As a call center manager, you’ve probably taken all the necessary steps to ensure online security and safe transactions for your customers as well as your company; like making sure your payment system is PCI compliant, utilizing encryption technology to make sure private financial information remains private, providing a secure login system for your customers, or staying current with all the security updates for your business’s network of computers.

 

However, are those actions enough to maximize online security for your call center operation and your customers?

A recent survey shows that a little less than half of Americans (45%) are aware of “the Heart-bleed bug,” a data security breach that affected the credit and debit cards of millions of American shoppers earlier this year. Of those who are aware, only about four in 10 have taken any specific action, like changing their password.

If this is the case, and consumers have become accustomed to data breaches, resulting in a failure to act; then, help them take action!

Here are a couple of additional steps that call centers can take to ensure a higher level of online security and help consumers take action to prevent a data breach:

1. Required Password Changes

Just like you do with your corporate networks, engineer your websites to require periodical password changes for continued access. This proactive measure could minimize the consequences of a future Heart-bleed type event.

2. Contact Users and Follow-up

Take more aggressive measures to contact users when a security breach occurs. With the Heart-bleed bug, many companies took immediate action to block the threat by patching their systems. However, just 16% of Americans received any notification about the bug at all. You need to make sure users get your notification and take action by following up on your communication. In order to do this, for example, you can plan a data breach notification follow-up protocol with your management team.