About Abri – Housing Association (Non-Profit)
Abri provides real estate services. The Company offers housing solutions and support services such as lease, buy, and rent services. Abri serves residents and other communities in the United Kingdom.
The Challenge
Abri was previously using outdated Virtual Terminals which take time to process payments & PCI-DSS guidelines suggest call centers should move away from processing payment in this way. Abri approached us with a brief to provide automated telephone payments to reduce agent processing time & streamline the payment process. At the same time Abri were also aware of the need to adhere to new PCI-DSS security standard version 3.2 compliance code of practice & wanted to remove their call center from the scope of PCI-DSS.
The Solution
After a consultation with all the staff involved in the payment process, Cyprium provided two solutions. First was to provide a fully automated telephone payment facility which included Tokenisation, so the tenants can setup an account to make quicker payments. Tenants can call in at any time of day & any day of week to make a payment to suit their working hours or a time convenient to them which ensure payments are made on time. This also reduces calls to the call center, freeing up lines enabling agents to deal with other important enquiries.
The second solution was to provide Agent Assisted calls. Abri is aware in most cases if an agent can always stay connected to the caller, they can help with any issues in the payment process and the payment can be taken successfully without the need for the caller to call back and start the process again which is time consuming especially if the original agent is on another call. Utilising their current 03 number we developed a solution which enabled agents to take a payment while remaining on the call, but the sensitive card details cannot be heard by the agent which removes the call center from the scope of PCI-DSS. The solution works across multiple sites drastically reducing development time & expense because no changes were required to their current telecom infrastructure ensuring development cost was kept to the minimum whilst providing inbuilt disaster recovery. The disaster recovery aspect of the solution was recently implemented with the outbreak of Covid19. Agents were able to work from home and process Agent Assisted calls without any changes to their homeworking setup and no PCI-DSS compliancy issues when taking payments outside the call center environment.
Why Cyprium Communications
Cyprium have over 20 years’ experience in voice technologies working with businesses across the UK to deliver high-quality, reliable voice and phone systems. Coupled with our ability to provide contact centrer payment solutions, we enable our customers, dealers & resellers the ultimate unified communications solution.