Fridays UK picks PCI Pal to secure card payments

PCI Pal has worked with restaurant group Fridays UK on the implementation of its Agent Assist solution, to ensure full PCI compliance when handling customers’ telephone-based card payments.

Fridays’ traditional walk-in service has been extended to include more booking led Click & Collect services, deliveries and a Fridays at Home range.

As such, a virtual contact centre was created to support its stores in managing the booking experience, which extended its PCI compliance requirements.

Erica Livermore, Chief Technology Officer at Fridays UK, says: “Prior to the pandemic, our business had begun moving away from just providing a dine-in service, and instead we started to offer a greater number of booking-based services.”

“As a result, we created a virtual contact centre to support our 85 UK stores, to help reduce administrative burdens on staff in our stores so they can instead focus on the guest experience.”

“A large part of this was to channel bookings from the website to the contact centre. Here, colleagues handle bookings for individual customers, and businesses, and the virtual team has the ability to take payments over the phone.”

“Of course, by enabling this, there is the requirement to extend our PCI compliance to telephone-based payments, and so we needed to ensure our solution supported this need, while also ensuring our team could remain in verbal contact with customers.”

Livermore adds: “We are very strict on security protocols and therefore PCI Pal had to go through onboarding on our side, which they passed with flying colours.”

“We are PCI certified and go through our accreditations every year. Implementation was very quick and we were able to roll-out to our virtual contact centre team seamlessly.”

“The fact this could be completed remotely, due to the cloud-based nature of the solution, was an added advantage given the various lockdowns we were all facing due to the pandemic. It’s been a really good experience.”

PCI complianceStaff WriterPCI Pal, Fridays UK, Restaurants, Hospitality and leisure, Payments, PCI compliance, Card paymentsComment