8×8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading provider of cloud communications and customer engagement solutions, today announced a partnership with PCI Pal, a specialist provider of secure payment solutions for customer engagement. By combining the 8×8 cloud contact centre solution and PCI Pal’s secure payment suite, contact centres and customer service departments can operate to the highest levels of PCI security without impacting customer experience.

With the number of credit card transactions in the UK growing to 19 billion in 2016, businesses increasingly need to be able to securely process card payments over the phone, but without impacting customer service. The partnership enables contact centres and service desks to meet PCI DSS compliance obligations and deliver exceptional customer service at the same time by protecting customer payment information when taking card payments over the phone.

James Barham, Chief Commercial Officer at PCI Pal, said “In a world growing ever more complicated from data regulation and increased risk of cybercrime, we find businesses with contact centres have a significant challenge to achieve compliance and security whilst also maintaining excellent customer service. We’re excited to partner with 8×8 and integrate with their cloud Virtual Contact Centre solutions to deliver a non-intrusive, flexible, scalable and secure solution that caters to modern contact centre operations and their customers.”

Kevin Scott-Cowell, UK MD 8×8, said “We’re always looking for new ways to empower our customers so they can provide the best possible service to their users, and our partnership with PCI Pal will do exactly this. We’re excited that businesses will now be able to further improve the customer experience they offer, without compromising on compliance and security.”

For businesses, the partnership will reduce the amount of work needed to be fully compliant with payment regulations, eliminating the need to manually create a separate secure network infrastructure and operational controls to meet PCI DSS. For example, the recording for quality and training purposes no longer requires manual intervention for taking payment information, providing customers a seamless experience. Unlike other solutions, PCI Pal completely descopes data from customer calls so no sensitive information is recorded. The data is fully encrypted when transferred to the merchant, so there is no risk to the customer.

This partnership further bolsters the strong feature set of the 8×8 cloud contact centre offering, including seamless communications and collaboration, channel of choice, market-leading analytics, workforce optimisation and CRM integration.

PCI Pal is a Level 1 certified PCI DSS service provider and works with all major credit card companies.