There’s been a big rise in consumers using online chat to interact with organizations recently. Superoffice suggests that as many as 41% of consumers now expect live chat to be offered on an organization’s website. Indeed, there’s evidence that consumers prefer live chat to other digital contact center channels, with 46% of customers stating a […]
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As if the airline industry didn’t already have enough to worry about, with a 90% drop in traffic due to COVID- 19 and the ongoing threat to business from quarantine measures around the world, Easyjet is now the latest to report a huge data breach. According to news bulletins, some 9m customers’ details have been […]
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The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council’s 2018 guidelines entitled ‘Protecting Telephone-based Payment Card Data’ shifted the emphasis from their 2011 advice to securing spoken card data (as opposed to securing recorded payment card data). But now contact centers are embracing a multitude of newer digital channels in addition to voice, what are the best […]
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Many merchants have responded to the Covid-19 epidemic by either asking their contact center agents to stay safe and work from home, or by routing calls to outsourcers handling calls on their behalf. Both of these present a number of unique security challenges and associated risk. During these difficult times, it is clearly important for […]
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If you’re a contact center operations manager or responsible for IT or telephony, you’ll be used to being bombarded with buzzwords and ‘envisioning’ the contact center of the future. By now, you’re probably on your way to providing a ‘customer engagement center’, with multiple channels seamlessly integrated for tech-savvy consumers to switch between at will. […]
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Syntec background Syntec was founded as a hospital bedside telephony company in 1998. Whilst this business was subsequently sold off, we’d grown into a UK network operator, switching vast quantities of call traffic internationally on behalf of a growing customer base of call centers belonging to major merchants. We’d also diversified into providing proprietary, managed […]
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Call center managers face an array of technical solutions to meet the requirements of PCI DSS and the necessary protection of payment card data for their customers. Two solutions often considered by merchants are point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and DTMF masking. In this blog post I’ll consider the pros and cons of each option. Point-to-point […]
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“A real game changer” In November 2018, the global PCI Security Standards Council published its long-awaited new Information Supplement entitled Protecting Telephone-based Payment Card Data. John Greenwood, Executive Director of Compliance3 and a contributor to Syntec’s recent white paper on PCI DSS in contact centers sums up his views on the new guidelines as follows: “These […]
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It seems that major customer data breaches are hitting the headlines with increased frequency. British Airways, Ticketmaster, Sears, Adidas, Macys, Kmart, Delta Airlines, Best Buy and MyFitnessPal are just some of the big name brands that have been hit in 2018 so far, and of course Marriott announced last week a hack affecting up to […]
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The global Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), of which Syntec is a participating member organization, has just published its most important guidance on payment card data security in call centers and contact centers since 2011. Entitled ‘Protecting Telephone-Based Payment Card Data’, this brings up to date their guidance on how merchants should […]
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