Case Study: The Globe and Mail Secures Payments With SequenceShift

Owned by Woodbridge, the investment arm of the Thomson family, The Globe and Mail was founded in 1844 and is Canada’s foremost news media company, considered by many Canadians to be part of their national fabric.

Covering events that change their nation as well as the day-to-day happenings that continue to shape the country, The Globe leads the national discussion through its award-winning coverage of news, politics, business, investing and lifestyle topics, across multiple platforms.

The Globe and Mail print and digital formats reach over 6 million readers every week, with the Report on Business magazine reaching over 1.5 million readers every issue in print and digital.

Challenges

To ensure smooth and safe interactions of the highest possible quality, The Globe and Mail needed to integrate the PCI compliance standards when they integrated their existing Salesforce dashboard with the cloud-based Amazon Connect.

As a business model, The Globe and Mail contact centres are predominantly direct to customer; when their agents speak to customers on the phone, they ensure the customer has an excellent experience and encounters no issues when providing sensitive personal and credit card data.

One of the industry trends that forced The Globe to search for a better PCI solution was handling plain-text credit card numbers.

They had to focus on reducing the business risk associated with having a customer care agent taking full credit card numbers and instead implement a solution that could ensure all credit card data was entered in a customer self-service flow and immediately tokenized.

For Susan Kelly, Vice President Information Technology at The Globe and Mail, this meant finding a product that would reduce the risk associated with accepting credit card payments over the phone and reducing the scope for PCI compliance.

Solution

Bryan Fox (Customer Care Manager) and Zenalyn Habito (Senior Director – Loyalty, Retention and Customer Care) heard about the product at Dreamforce when they visited the Amazon Connect Booth.

From this interaction, The Globe and Mail chose to work with SequenceShift as the recommended provider, sitting alongside Amazon Connect and ensuring PCI-DSS standards were maintained.

Since the integration of SequenceShift, Amazon Connect and Salesforce, The Globe and Mail customers now have the ability to enter their own credit card numbers that are obfuscated and not visible or discernable via touch-tone or by the call centre agents.

From an operational standpoint, while the customer enters their card and CVV, call centre agents can enter the cardholder name and have the Payline by SequenceShift webpage pre-populated with the amount to be paid, streamlining the entire process.

Results

The enhanced PCI status put The Globe and Mail in a position to deploy a remote work strategy for Call Centre staff during the pandemic. This helped provide a safe and secure option for staff to continue supporting their customers.

The reduced risk around handling sensitive credit card information was well received by customers and Call Centre staff.

The revised workflow also had minimal impact on productivity (Average Handle Time) while at the same time increasing PCI status. A win-win solution!

For The Globe and Mail, the relationship with SequenceShift evolved from being purely service based to one that they consider to be “the model of an excellent partnership with an external vendor.”

“From a security perspective, another benefit is the ability to use existing single sign-on capabilities that authenticate to Payline, saving time and money.

Overall, Payline has fit well into our overall digital transformation plans. It is cloud based, nimble and fit for purpose,” said Susan Kelly.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of SequenceShift – View the Original Article

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