Boost your business this Black Friday and Cyber Monday | PCI Telecom

The shopping season will very soon be upon us when shoppers go crazy for a bargain on Black Friday and hunt frantically for the perfect gifts for Christmas. How a business handles this increase in trade can take some planning, ensuring your systems are ready for the rise in demand to keep the business going and customers happy. While the focus is often on marketing and tweaking the product offering, many forget to think about the purchasing process be it online or over the phone, leading to bad customer experiences and overloaded workforce.

There’s a simple way to avoid this. Investing in a card payment transaction system that works for your business will support you through the busy times and beyond. Here’s how:

Speed up the payment process

No customer wants to sit on hold. And no business should be happy about it either – a frustrated customer is less likely to spend money with you and much more likely to go to your competitor. Moving to a payment system that is faster and more efficient means you’ll be able to process more calls and transactions in less time – a win win all round.

Choosing to install a cloud-based solution, like those in our PCI Agent suite, offers flexibility and scalability to handle higher demand during busy periods by enabling you to add and remove users as required and ensuring you have the right amount of staff available to manage calls effectively. Add to that our Auto IFR solution enabling purchases and payments out of hours, without the need for a call handler, and you have yourself an all-round solution that delivers a positive purchasing experience for the customer, meaning they’ll be more inclined to return in future.

Integrate with back end systems

Investing in a system that works with other back end processes such as CRM database and stock monitoring means that you can deliver the best possible service to customers and while supporting other business functions. At PCI Telecom, our card transaction solutions support payments made over the phone as well as online and integrate seamlessly with other business functions. This includes monitoring and analysing traffic so that you can plan for the busy periods.

Protect customer payment card data

Many small businesses make the mistake of thinking that they are under the radar when it comes to cyber attack and too small to be of interest to hackers. Actually, small businesses are just as vulnerable to attack and perceived to be easier targets, especially at this time of year. Making sure you’re up to speed with the latest PCI compliance recommendations relevant to the size of your business is a must. Alternatively, descoping your business from its PCI DSS compliance obligations by outsourcing your card payment system to an external provider, such as us, means you’ll free up more time to focus on managing your core business of delivering products and services to your customer. Our PCI compliant card payment solutions feature end to end encryption so at no point is your client card data accessible to staff and transactions are carried out directly between our cloud-based system and the issuing bank avoiding the risk of data breach.

We know from working with clients that the one size fits all approach to creating card payment processing systems doesn’t always work for smaller businesses who feel the peaks and troughs of variances in sales more intensely than their larger counterparts. That’s why we have created a suite of solutions that can be adjusted to suit the needs of businesses of any shape and size. Our solutions are cloud-based, affordable, flexible and meet all the criteria for complying with PCI DSS guidelines. To find out more, visit our solutions page or to talk through your requirements, get in touch here.