Security Standards for Basic PCI Compliance
PCI (or Payment Card Industry) Compliance refers to the security standards that businesses who accept credit cards must follow. Any business, from startup to franchise, must follow these regulations to ensure the safety of their consumers’ privacy and financial data. Failure to follow this code can result in loss of patronage, and even lawsuits. Learning how and why you should make sure your business PCI compliant can save you and your customers from dangerous security breaches.
“PCI Compliant” refers to the twelve steps necessary to facilitate and maintain secure data storage standards, as defined by the PCI Security Standards Council. These are as follows:
- Installing and maintaining a firewall.
- Changing factory preset passwords and usernames on terminals and storage devices.
- Protecting stored data.
- Encrypting transmissions over public networks.
- Maintaining updated and relevant anti-virus applications.
- Developing and maintaining secure systems.
- Restricting cardholder data to limited access.
- Assigning personal sign-in information for everyone using computers.
- Restricting physical access to cardholder information.
- Monitoring network resources.
- Regularly testing security systems.
- Maintaining a PCI Compliance policy within company personnel.
Even if your business isn’t PCI Compliant, your methods of transferring, storing, and accessing your customers’ credit card data may still be safe, hence, why the term used is “compliant”. However, not using a compliant host for your data can open up a doorway for hackers who look for easy loopholes in your data’s security. The regulations are there to protect both companies and cardholders, alike, and are not subject to interpretation or misuse.
The penalties for not being PCI Compliant and suffering a security breach can be devastating to a company’s reputation, chasing customers and investors away with even a rumor of lax security. In addition to being sued and fined by companies who issue credit cards, a security breach can result in being investigated by the government, and the expense behind recuperating from a data security breach is steep.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common Questions About Restaurant Marketing
Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.
WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.
Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.
A restaurant customer data platform (CDP) is a unified software system that collects, consolidates, and activates guest data from multiple sources including WiFi networks, POS systems, online ordering platforms, reservation systems, websites, loyalty platforns, event platforms, and review sites. Unlike generic CDPs built for e-commerce or SaaS companies, restaurant CDPs are purpose-built to handle restaurant-specific data sources and create actionable guest intelligence that drives personalized marketing, operational improvements, and revenue growth automatically.
Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.
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