3 Pro Tips to Find the Best PCI Compliance Call Recording Solution for Business
When your company requires PCI call recording compliance, a fully-featured call recording platform is the fastest and most secure deployment method. Let’s take a look at critical features that your call recording and compliance platform absolutely must have as well as some additional features that can save you time and money while protecting you and your customer with the best call recording solution for business.
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PCI Call Recording Compliance: What Is It?
When your business takes customers’ credit cards and other sensitive data over the phone, your call recordings are vulnerable targets for cyber thieves. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was enacted to protect customer data and requires companies to remove sensitive information from records, whether audio, video or text.
In most instances, the vulnerable data target is credit card information, including the card number, user’s identification, expiration date, and card security code.
Why Do I Need PCI Call Recording Compliance?
No compliance law should be ignored. However, PCI DSS compliance is of the utmost importance for companies that record their calls because of the large amount of vulnerable customer data they collect within a typical business day.
PCI DSS failure is costly
Failing PCI call recording compliance puts your customers at risk, and if you do suffer a data breach, the costs can and will spiral. PCI DSS violations allow your customer to sue you, the government to find you, and the credit card companies themselves to pursue damages from you. In addition to repairing your infrastructure and paying legal fees, all of this makes PCI compliance for your call recordings critical.
Data Breaches damage Consumer Confidence
As recently as 2020, there were a total of 1001 data breaches in the US, and nearly 156 million individuals suffered personal data exposure due to inadequate security measures. A 2019 survey revealed that 3/4ths of consumers would abandon a brand online after a breach, and half won’t sign up for a service that suffered an online breach.
PCI Compliance Features Your Call Recorder Should Have
The cloud has given us vastly increased application processing power as well as highly secure data storage. It has also opened the door for call recording platforms to manage a company’s most complex security concerns regarding their customer recordings. Let’s look at the features your call recorder must have and some others that go above and beyond to maximize your data security and consumer confidence.
PCI Redaction Methods
Redaction is the process of scrubbing information from a data file, whether it’s text transcript, an audio recording, or visual format, like a screen recording. There are two basic methods of PCI redaction: manual and automatic.
Must-Have: Manual PCI Redaction Through API
Commonly, companies will build an API command into their agent software that allows agents to pause a call recording while a customer speaks sensitive data over the phone. Typically, when the agent says something like, “I’m ready for that card number,” the recording is manually paused by the agent and manually resumed after all of the card data has been entered.
This method is somewhat reliable but also leaves the process open to human error. In some instances, the agent may forget to pause the call recording when taking the sensitive information or fail to resume the recording after obtaining the information.
In other cases, the agent may make the mistake of physically writing the card number down to speed the process if they have to ask the customer for the card number again. Most call recording software should provide some means for an agent to pause call recording.
Above and Beyond: Big Benefits From Automatic PCI Redaction
With the help of advanced speech recognition and artificial intelligence, some call recording platforms can identify PCI data and automatically redact it. This is the mark of an exceptional recording platform because it reduces error by eliminating human interaction and allows agents to concentrate on the task at hand, assisting the customer.
Another good reason for deploying an advanced call recorder is that it would most likely use speech recognition and AI for many highly beneficial applications like emotional analysis, speech analytics, and keyword detection.
Above and Beyond: PCI Redaction for Multiple Media Types
Call recording platforms that offer PCI compliance must recognize that a modern call may not simply result in an audio recording. Audio recordings are often turned into transcripts that also need to be redacted. And what about on-screen activity that may include PCI Data? To reduce your risk of data exposure, you may require a combination of automatic and manual PCI redaction, depending on how your organization is set up.
If you record your agent’s screen along with every phone interaction, the screen recording should be manually paused anytime PCI Data appears on the screen. All PCI data must be removed from the transcription when your recordings are automatically transcribed.
And what about other vulnerable data the customer shares over the phone like Social Security or National Insurance identification numbers? A high-quality call recording platform should be able to remove any number string, not just credit card numbers. This feature should be prioritized for customer protection.
PCI DSS Compliance: Final Thoughts
There’s no reason your company ever needs to be responsible for a costly and damaging data breach. With the proper security measures, your data can be protected from the reach of cyber thieves, and your reputation can avoid suffering damage to your customers. Get the best call recording solution for business.
