AWS for Industries
AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency Partners you should know: SequenceShift
SequenceShift recently became the forty-seventh Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Travel and Hospitality Competency Partner.
I had the opportunity to interview Dmitri Muntean, Managing Director at SequenceShift, and Brad Fischer, Director of Partnerships at SequenceShift, to learn more about the company and their collaboration with AWS.
1. Congratulations on achieving Travel and Hospitality Competency Partner status. Please explain what SequenceShift does.
Thank you. We are excited to achieve the Travel and Hospitality Competency.
SequenceShift helps to solve PCI compliance issues related to credit card payments made over the phone. We currently provide two PCI compliance solutions designed specifically for Amazon Connect, with more to come.
The first solution, Payline for Amazon Connect, is for agent assisted payments. The customer uses their keypad to enter their card number and CVV while maintaining voice communication with the agent.
The second solution, Secure Payments IVR for Amazon Connect, allows customers to make self-service credit card payments over the phone.
Both solutions help businesses minimize their exposure to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
2. How do your products help travel and hospitality customers? What pain points do you solve?
Every company that deals with credit card data is subject to a PCI compliance audit. This adds a lot of burden to internal systems because these companies must track how payments are processed, how cards are saved, and so on.
Our solutions minimize PCI compliance exposure for our customers by outsourcing credit card data capture and processing to SequenceShift. This allows our customers to focus on their core competency while we take care of credit card processing. The availability of our product in AWS Marketplace makes it easy for our customers to implement our solutions quickly.
3. How does collaborating with AWS and Amazon Connect benefit your customers?
SequenceShift is an advanced technology partner of AWS. Our solutions are built for Amazon Connect and built on AWS, using services like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and AWS Lambda. We have been collaborating with AWS and Amazon Connect for a long time. In fact, we released one of the earliest PCI compliance solutions for Amazon Connect, soon after it became publicly available.
Traditionally, PCI compliance solutions have been complex and high cost. However, using AWS we are able to deliver a pay-as-you-go model for our customers instead of a more complex agent license cost model.
Our solutions are available globally wherever Amazon Connect is available, and the data is processed in the same AWS Region as our customers’ Amazon Connect Region. That helps with data sovereignty as no data crosses the Region’s boundary.
4. Can you tell us about a Travel and Hospitality customer that implemented SequenceShift Solution? What were the results?
We worked with Collinson, a company that provides loyalty solutions for airlines, hotels, and retail brands to solve their travel loyalty contact center PCI compliance issues. Collinson migrated from their legacy contact center solution to Amazon Connect, a cloud contact center service. Moving to Amazon Connect enabled customer service agents to work from home. While that helped reduced costs, it also led to new PCI compliance challenges. Agents were handling sensitive customer data while operating from insecure environments.
Collinson began using the Payline for Amazon Connect solution for payment processing. Doing so improved the company’s PCI compliance and reduced delays when collecting credit card information, which led to a noticeable increase in customer satisfaction and retention.
Other Travel and Hospitality customers of SequenceShift include major airlines, travel agencies, and companies that handle customer loyalty programs for airports, and railroad operators.
5. Can you explain how Travel and Hospitality customers can start using your product? What is the software procurement process?
One of our big differentiators is that customers can go into the AWS Marketplace, buy, and set up our solution in less than an hour. Through this self-service portal, customers can set up their payment provider configuration and get started almost immediately in any AWS region. When customers sign up, they enter a free trial period with SequenceShift, and they are not charged until they go live. During the free trial period customers can set up our service and test it end-to-end. This allows them to quickly assess if the service meets their requirements and see how it works in their environment.
6. Can you talk about innovation at SequenceShift and any new products you are working on in partnership with AWS?
Similar to AWS, we work backwards from customer needs or problems and build solutions for them. Our team all come with a PCI and security background, so we’re familiar with common compliance challenges and are always looking for new solutions. We think there is an opportunity to improve compliance and the customer experience by offering pay-by-link or pay-through-text options.
Conclusion
To learn more about how you can work with SequenceShift, visit the AWS Marketplace.