Craig Schoeberle is Senior Director of IT and Infrastructure Management at Parts Town.
Danny: Can you start off just by giving me a bit of background about Parts Town?
Craig: Parts Town is one of the largest suppliers of commercial food service parts in the world. We supply only OEM replacement parts from the manufacturers of commercial kitchen equipment, like refrigeration, ovens, cookware, anything within the kitchen. We work with different manufacturers of the equipment as well as service organizations. Our customers are service personnel and manufacturers, as well as restaurant owners – basically anything with a kitchen.
Danny: How does the contact center fit into that? What’s its role?
Craig: Our contact center serves several purposes. Our customer service team primarily takes orders directly from our customers. Then we also have a technical support team that works directly with the manufacturers of the equipment to perform part lookups and help troubleshoot problems.
Our contact center is divided into different business segments. For example, we have an institution segment that services business that have commercial kitchens, but are not restaurants like hospitals, cruise lines schools and so on. We also have a chains division that services popular quick-service restaurants, the big brand chains.
Where we leverage CardEasy is for security and PCI DSS compliance as we take credit card payments over the phone.
Danny: How many operatives do you have?
Craig: The contact center operates across multiple sites, including Canada and the US. We have approximately 450 customer service representatives.
Danny: Do some of those work from home or are they all physically located in a contact center?
Craig: Well, currently, due to COVID, we are working remotely, but we do have a very large contact center in Addison, Illinois, as well as Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Danny: Can you tell me about the background to the decision to implement CardEasy?
Craig: As we have taken on the PCI compliance journey, our strategy has been to limit our scope and reduce our Card Data Environment. Basically, we no longer store or process credit cards. CardEasy allowed us to fully de-scope our contact center environment from PCI DSS by providing the ability for payment card data to be captured, processed and tokenized without it ever entering our environment. CardEasy is integrated directly with our credit card processor.
Danny: What was the process of deciding to go with CardEasy like? Were there other options that you looked at?
Craig: We looked at building out this product ourselves using our IVR but ultimately, we felt that it would be very cumbersome, and it would require a lot more maintenance and cost to do it that way. We were very attracted to the CardEasy solution as it supports both our Cisco telephony, as well as our credit card processor. It was a match made in heaven.
Danny: It worked with all your existing systems?
Craig: Correct. It was very simple to integrate with all of our existing systems. The folks at CardEasy are amazing to work with. They’re very responsive, very professional, very technical. They really know the product and they’re very passionate about it. They align with our core values at Parts Town. We’re big on innovation, passion, courage and integrity – all that good stuff – and the CardEasy team are as well. It’s been a great experience. We love working with the CardEasy team.
Danny: What benefits have you seen since you’ve implemented CardEasy?
Craig: We have a much more secure and robust environment which is PCI DSS compliant. CardEasy is a very simple solution to use – for both our customers and our customer service representatives. It’s very easy for the customer to enter their card information, plus it adds a level of security for the customer as well, knowing that their credit card details are being handled safely and securely. CardEasy protects our brand and our reputation.
Danny: Do you think data security is something that customers care more about these days?
Craig: Yes. Most definitely with all of the cyber threats and security issues that are going on today it’s very important for us to provide enhanced security as far as customers are concerned. We take security very seriously here, as do our customers.
Danny: What about the contact center staff? Have they embraced it?
Craig: Yes. They all use it, and as I mentioned it’s a very simple system to use and implement. It’s been very good. We’ve been using CardEasy for more than two years now and we’re very happy with it.
Danny: You were using it pre-pandemic then? Did you find that it was useful when you came to moving towards working remotely?
Craig: Yes, absolutely. It works in exactly the same way, whether you’re in the contact center or working remotely and provides our business and our customers with exactly the same benefits. Without CardEasy, we would have been unable to maintain our PCI DSS compliance while remote working and accepting card payments over the phone.
Danny: Would you recommend it to other organizations?
Craig: Absolutely I would. CardEasy is a very simple system to implement, it’s cost-effective and they are a Level 1 service provider, so they are also able to provide all the necessary documentation for a PCI DSS audit.
