Member Article

Darlington Borough Council secures contact centre payments with PCI Pal

• PCI Pal Agent Assist delivers PCI DSS compliance and enhances payment experience for the public sector -

Darlington Borough Council has selected PCI Pal® to manage its contact centre payment security and ensure it adheres to the compliance standards relating to card-based payment transactions.

Having undertaken an exercise to self-certify the council’s PCI DSS compliance status, it was agreed that telephone payments was an area that needed attention in order to replace a Pause and Resume solution.

Working with its payment provider, Civica, the Council has upgraded to the PCI Pal Agent Assist solution, which allows secure payments to be taken using dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) masking technology. This means callers input payment card details using their telephone keypad. This information is intercepted by PCI Pal’s technology, which conceals all sensitive information, and payment details are automatically routed to the Council’s payment processor to complete the transaction.

Andrew Hazlett, Systems & Process Officer at Darlington Borough Council explains: “Previously, our contact centre agents would have to manually pause telephone recordings so we didn’t capture any payment card details, but that still meant the information was exposed to our agents and infrastructure - just not captured within our call recordings. We wanted a solution that would remove the onus from our staff on pausing and resuming calls and stop any sensitive information entering our environment.”

The Council’s contact centre is the first point of contact for all of its services, as Andrew continues: “When implementing any new system, you worry that it’s going to create a big change for users or the integration won’t be as seamless as you anticipate, however with PCI Pal everything was so organised: the implementation was fast and communication was good. Now it’s live we are assured that the Council is using the best payment compliance tool for our telephone payments; it’s very reassuring.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by PCI Pal .