My husband was recently booking some travel for us and had an interesting experience that he thought was worth sharing. While he was providing his credit card number to the person who was assisting with the booking, that person told him before he gave the credit card number and CVV number to wait a moment, as she was going to stop recording the conversation. Both of us were impressed at the forward thinking this company shows in requesting credit card numbers over the telephone.

This is quite brilliant on two levels. The first is, if the call center stops recording the call while a customer is giving the full credit card number and CVV, then that information is not contained in any recordings that may be compromised in the future—not only from outside intrusions, but also from insider threats. This is a reduction of risk to the company in the event of a compromise of the call center recordings. The second is that it is respectful to the customer and shows that the company cares enough about the privacy of the customer to literally stop the conversation and tell the customer that the company is stopping the recording of the credit card information before taking it down. I know we felt good about this process, and felt really good about the company’s protection of our credit card information. We were impressed at the fact that the company was focused enough on privacy and security to even think of this detail. It was a great customer relations move, and we will not hesitate to book with this company again. In fact, we would go out of our way to do so.

Based upon this recent positive experience—if you are taking personal information, such as Social Security numbers and credit card numbers with CVV codes over the telephone, consider putting a process in place to stop recording customer calls while that sensitive information is being provided to your call center representatives. It has the potential to reduce the company’s risk in the event of a compromise and also conveys to your customers how much you care about data privacy and security.