How to combat fraud
Without Semafone, there are many steps that must be taken to ensure that your customer data is secure from agents who may have been coerced into stealing sensitive information for the purposes of fraud. Recruiting staff involves lengthy background checking and checks with the Criminal Records Bureau, which can be costly, and they are still not guaranteed to be accurate.
The call centre environment must also be carefully monitored to ensure that no information can be taken out of the organisation using pen and paper or by electronic means. This is especially problematic where agents work at home, as it is difficult to have complete control over remote workers and what information they have access to.
You can see from the table below there are many difficulties in preventing security breaches:
| Challenge | Potential solution | Comments | Resolved? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff recruitment | Criminal Records Bureau referral, background checks and referencing. | Expensive and time consuming to manage and still prone to error and inaccuracy. | no |
| Physical controls | Physical area security, no personal items at the workstation, pencils only and numbered sheets of paper. No Internet or email access. | These physical controls can create a problematic cultural dynamic leading to increased attrition and recruitment challenges. | no |
| Homeworking | N/A | Processing payment card data in the home environment will not meet PCI DSS 1.2 obligations. | no |
| Off-shore transaction processing | N/A | Controlling payment card information across borders is problematic from a cardholder confidence perspective. Plus, some offshore locations have higher compromise rates than on-shore equivalents. | no |
| Secure voice transactions with Semafone | An easily implemented solution that means your agents do not hear or have access to sensitive information, wherever they are based. This eliminates the risk of payment fraud. | yes |
Semafone's unique solution uses DTMF technology to mask the customers' sensitive data when they input card numbers into their telephone keypad instead of speaking them to the agent. What's more, agents don't see the data as it is entered, and the information does not need to be held anywhere on the contact centre systems. The revolutionary system eliminates the risk of fraud and even reduces the burden of PCI compliance.
