Mobile payments are on the rise, and Black Friday 2016 was proof of this. A new study from Adobe showed that U.S. shoppers used a mobile device to spend $1.2 billion during the biggest shopping day of the year. This means that 2016 is the first time that mobile online shopping revenues have exceeded $1 billion during Black Friday.
Online shopping accounted for $5.27 billion for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The majority of this came from savvy shoppers using their mobile devices to make purchases.
- 45% of purchases came from smartphones
- 10% from tablets
- 45% came from computers.
55% of online sales came from smart devices, and total online sales increased by 21.6% over last year.
What does this mean for your business? It means your company should allow customers the convenience of a mobile payment solution. Otherwise, your customer may just see if your competitors do.
Accept Payments? Accept Risk!
The best way to make payments easier for your customers is to offer solutions that are convenient for them without compromising security. Some customers still use checks, but that method is slowly dying out. While a traditional payment, checks are not the most secure method for accepting payments.
In order to receive payments, safely and securely, a business should be PCI Compliant. This means your customer can make a payment from any phone line, or any location, without risking their credit info. To do this, your company should process customer payments using a secure automated system.
Couldn’t call center agents process payments just as efficiently? No, when a customer pays over the phone to an agent it’s still risky. To understand this, Let’s review the PCI DSS scope.
What is PCI scope?
The PCI DSS defines scope as “the PCI DSS security requirements [that] apply to all system components included in or connected to the cardholder data environment.” This environment is comprised of people, processes, and technologies that store, process, or transmit cardholder data or sensitive authentication.
Therefore, if something in your system stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data it’s considered in scope.
In order for a call center agent to process a payment, the customer would need to relay their payment information over the phone. This means that the agent, or anyone within earshot of the caller, could use this information maliciously.
Without a PCI DSS Compliant solution, you’re putting your cardholder’s information at risk.
Fortunately, we can help…
PCI DSS Compliant IVR Payments: The Solution is Simple
We can take your call center agents out of PCI scope. IVR Technology secures and encrypts your customer’s information. As this information is not being passed to an agent or being stored on your systems it is secure with our solution, Compass Pay.
Compass Pay allows convenient payments, without compromising security. Our mobile payment solution is PCI Level 1 Compliant, the highest level of security compliance that a service provider can receive.