intoThe regulations set down by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) govern the exchange of payment data, storage, and utilization.
While PCI has no legal authority to enforce compliance, it is a requirement for any organization looking to operate debit/credit card transactions. Worryingly, a 2020 survey by Verizon revealed that only 27.9 percent of organizations were fully compliant with the Data Security Standard (DSS) set up by PCI.
Even worse, this was a visible decline from 36.7 percent in the previous year.
To help businesses get back on track, let's consider the various tenets of PCI-DSS and why they are proving so tricky for contact centers to comply with.
What Does PCI Compliance Entail?
PCI DSS spans six distinct areas to help protect payment information and customer data privacy. These include:
- Network Security
- Encryption
- Security software
- Access Restrictions
- Security Documentation
- Regular Network Audits
As contact centers regularly communicate over more channels, they now have many more considerations to make across each segment.
Yet, the lion's share of a contact center's responsibility in maintaining PCI compliance is agent training and quality assurance. IT must support the remaining components, communicating regularly with infrastructure providers.
Critical Steps for PCI Compliance
Many steps can make achieving and demonstrating compliance with PCI-DSS easier.
First, clarify the processes surrounding payment data collection. Also, encrypt payment data fetched from public systems, CRM, websites, e-Commerce apps, supplier portals, etc.