PCI Pal, – the global provider of cloud-based secure payment solutions – has supported restaurant group Fridays UK with the implementation of its PCI Pal Agent Assist solution, to ensure full PCI compliance when handling customers’ telephone-based card payments.
With a changing operational model, Fridays’ traditional ‘walk-in’ service has been extended to include more booking-led ‘Click & Collect’ services, deliveries and a Fridays at Home range. As such, a virtual contact center was created to support its stores in managing the booking experience, which extended its PCI compliance requirements.
Erica Livermore, Chief Technology Officer of Fridays UK, said: “Prior to the pandemic, our business had begun moving away from just providing a dine-in service, and instead we started to offer a greater number of booking-based services. As a result, we created a virtual contact center to support our 85 UK stores, to help reduce administrative burdens on staff in our stores so they can instead focus on the guest experience.
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“A large part of this was to channel bookings from the website to the contact center. Here, colleagues handle bookings for individual customers, and businesses, and the virtual team has the ability to take payments over the phone. Of course, by enabling this, there is the requirement to extend our PCI compliance to telephone-based payments, and so we needed to ensure our solution supported this need, while also ensuring our team could remain in verbal contact with customers.”
PCI Pal Agent Assist was selected as the payment security solution of choice. It enables contact center agents to capture customers’ card information securely on live calls, yet maintain conversation with the customer at all times. The technology uses DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) masking technology, as well as Speech Recognition for customers who can’t use their telephone keypad, and provides a secure way of handling payments without bringing an organization’s environment in scope of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
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Erica Livermore said: “At Fridays UK we are very strict on security protocols and therefore PCI Pal had to go through onboarding on our side, which they passed with flying colors. We are PCI-Certified and go through our accreditations every year. Implementation was very quick and we were able to roll-out to our virtual contact center team seamlessly. The fact this could be completed remotely, due to the cloud-based nature of the solution, was an added advantage given the various lockdowns we were all facing due to the pandemic. It’s been a really good experience.”
Best known for its expert bartenders, American-inspired food and drink, including quality steaks, famous burgers and ribs, TGI Fridays operates almost 900 restaurants in 60 countries, including 85 Fridays outlets in England, Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands, where more than 12 million guests are served each year.
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