You need strong contact centre security. It protects your reputation, keeps customers confident and happy, and it helps you avoid penalties. You deal with sensitive customer information — from payment cards, to names, to insurance or security numbers.
With the vulnerabilities caused by rogue insiders, external bad actors, and outdated or flawed technology, there’s a lot to consider when boosting your contact centre security.
So, what are the best practices to observe when securing your contact centre?
Start with reinforcing your fundamental security practices
Whenever you want to improve your security practices, it pays to start by making sure your foundations are as tight as they can be.
This includes factors such as up-to-date, strong antivirus software. It includes strong password policies and practices. All your software should have the most recent security updates, and you should have a firewall in place.
These things are fundamental because they work. So start by making sure they’re the best they can be.
Use MFA
MFA, short for multi-factor authentication, is an authentication method that requires the completion of two or more authentication factors to allow access.
In terms of contact centre security, you can apply MFA to both your agents as they log in to your systems and tools, and contacting customers as they make use of your service.
Automate alerts
If your security software detects an anomaly, it’s not ideal just putting a notification in the system. After all, there’s a good chance no one will see it right away.
Automation can help contact centre security by improving this alert gap. So, set up automated alerts to send a message to a human that can check out any anomalies when the systems detect them.
This results in faster response times to potential threats — and a better chance of preventing a breach.
Encrypt vulnerable data
Both data at rest and data in transit can be vulnerable. So, you can boost your contact centre security by encrypting your data.
If you want to protect it, you must encrypt it.
A great way to do this is to make use of contact centre tools that have encryption features built-in. Take WhosOn live chat, for example. WhosOn has chat encryption, so your chat data gets encrypted across all touchpoints.
Another option is to make use of automation software to automatically have all data encrypted (and decrypted) as needed.
Maintain strong access controls
An often-forgotten boost to your contact centre security is the power of strong access controls. For PCI compliance, it’s a must. For strong security, it’s a best practice that should be employed.
Access controls should allow you to identify users interacting with your systems — when they access them, and the specific systems in question. They should also be restrictive. The fewer people that have access to your sensitive contact centre data, the more secure it is. So, unless someone needs it to complete their job, they don’t have access.
It’s also important to maintain these access rights. As agents swap departments, roles, and grow with your contact centre, they can end up accruing more access rights than they need. This is called privilege creep, and it’s a security risk to guard against.
Use tools that support PCI DSS compliance
If your contact centre deals with taking payment card information at any point, you must be PCI DSS compliant. Using tools that help you achieve this, then, is another best practice for boosting your contact centre security.
For example, WhosOn has a PCI/PII masking feature. This helps keep sensitive data private (boosting security) when customers reaching out to your contact centre share information they shouldn’t.
N.B: There is no such thing as ‘compliant software’ — software is a tool that you can use to achieve compliance. It isn’t software that makes you compliant by default.
Don’t neglect physical security measures
A final best practice tip for boosting your contact centre security takes a step back from the tech and policies. It’s also important to make sure your physical security is strong — that you’re protecting the physical machines that store your sensitive information.
This means things like locking doors, locking computers, preventing outside equipment from being plugged into your machines, and so on.
Contact centre security
The ways to boost contact centre security don’t differ much from the best practices to boost any cybersecurity. The contact centre does, however, have its own challenges and boons.
It faces a challenge in ensuring secure data collection practices. But it enjoys a boon in the contact centre tools available that come equipped with rich security features to aid in their data protection.
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