Companies forever have relied on live, manual capture of sensitive customer data via the telephone by the customer verbalizing their information. While this approach still works and most companies are still using it in their everyday workflow, times are changing, and so are the ways in which we now can and should capture personally identifiable information (PII) such as credit card data, social security numbers, pin numbers, account numbers and so on.  This data is simply too personal to verbalize and to rely on the staffer on the other end of the line to properly capture and protect the information. It is all too easy for an agent to (innocently or egregiously) write the credit card number down on a Post-It note, for example, and forget to throw it out or recycle it for fraudulent purposes.  This is not to say that agents are likely to intentionally misuse our data, but it can and does happen.

Businesses across all verticals today are far too susceptible to data misuse by their agents to continue operating as usual with verbal and manual PII data collection. By continuing in this manner, these companies leave themselves vulnerable to wrongdoing, again, whether intentionally or unintentionally.  The new way forward is with secure, DTMF data capture in which the customer themselves enters their PII into their telephone keypad and that data is securely routed and stored in a PCI server that is inaccessible to the call center agent. This sensitive data also completely bypasses the call recording system and only shows up on the agent’s screen as encrypted numbers.

Think about this new approach for a minute.  Why not change the way we do things today? Let’s start taking the risk out of the PII data capture equation and empower customers to transmit their sensitive data on their own. In this way, you could have any agent start collecting PII, with no risk of misuse. No more dedicated credit card collection teams. No more routing calls to specially trained agents.

As new game-changing technologies emerge, we must embrace them and work them into our businesses if we are to improve our productivity and efficiency and minimize our exposure. Companies are just now starting to employ DTMF data capture technology across the world and it’s time to start really moving that needle.

To learn more, please visit www. https://www.intranext.com/intranext-products/iguard