New secure credit card payment solution removes the risk of credit card fraud within contact centres

• Sabio ‘Hybrid Agent’ PCI solution ensures that customers no longer have to share personal credit card details with agents; protects agents from exposure to potential fraud

• Helps contact centre operators meet both their PCI payment card and FSA compliance monitoring requirements

LONDON – 14 August 2008 – Sabio, the leading contact centre consultancy services company, has launched a new secure credit card payment solution that removes the risk of fraud for customers making credit card payments during calls to contact centres. Sabio’s new solution fully supports the latest PCI credit card security standards, and is particularly relevant for contact centre operators as it helps them meet both their PCI payment card and FSA compliance monitoring requirements.

The new PCI capability is part of Sabio’s Hybrid Agent suite of voice self-service solutions, and effectively isolates the critical transactional element of a call by transferring customers to a secure, speech-enabled credit card payments line, giving callers the security and re-assurance of not having to share their card account details, PINs and CVV2 numbers. Sabio Hybrid Agent also shields contact centre agents from the need to handle sensitive customer data and exposure to potential fraud.

“Our new solution is applicable for the growing number of contact centre operators – including outsourcers – who need to collect credit card payments securely. We’ll be offering it to a range of organisations including retail contact centres that offer extended warranties, outsourcers offering FSA-regulated services on behalf of their customers, companies offering home cover, and motoring organisations providing services such as breakdown recovery,” commented Stuart Dorman, Solutions Architect at Sabio.

“One of the most common reasons that merchants fail their PCI audits is through the incorrect storage and location of prohibited credit card data such as account numbers, CVV2 and PINs. This is proving a real challenge for organisations that have to record their calls for FSA compliance reasons and don’t have any way of consistently halting recordings during the exchange of sensitive credit card data. Our Hybrid Agent solution solves this problem while delivering new levels of protection for both callers and contact centre agents,” he continued.

With Hybrid Agent, Sabio’s specialist Voice Self-Service practice has combined self-service and call recording technologies to create the first truly integrated approach to this issue. When a customer is ready to make a credit card payment during the call, the contact centre agent simply transfers the call to Hybrid Agent’s secure PCI-compliant payment function. At the appropriate stage all call recording is halted to ensure that the customer’s sensitive credit card data isn’t held anywhere on the system. Callers can then make their payment using either a traditional DTMF-enabled or speech-based IVR system, and when the transaction is complete the call is re-connected with the agent to close the interaction.

With its dedicated Voice Self-Service practice, Sabio is one of the few contact centre specialists to offer the key elements essential for successful speech applications – a specialist, user-centred speech design approach based on conversational techniques, the right persona and customer engagement strategies, business and systems integration skills, and the latest open standards-based technologies. Sabio Hybrid Agent is one in the growing suite of value added Voice solutions offered by Sabio, which includes advanced capabilities such as Agent Salutation, voice biometrics-enabled identity verification and digital signatures.

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council is a global open industry standards body providing management of a range of payment card standards covering Data Security, PIN Entry Devices, Security Requirements and Payment Application Data Security. Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of comprehensive requirements for Security.