Hurtigruten

Hurtigruten is the world’s leading adventure travel group, offering unique small ship and land-based adventures to some of the most spectacular places in the world. It has customers from all over the world and they expect a high level of service from its contact center in Tallin, Estonia. It also has satellite offices in Tromsø, Melbourne and Seattle so it is a truly global company and operates 24 hours a day.

Hurtigruten’s contact center

“The contact center is extremely important to us, given the nature of our products and the cost of our cruises – some can cost up to £200,000. If you’re going to spend that amount of money you want to speak to someone who is an expert in where you’re going, and you may well want to make more than one call. We know that our online penetration is between 50% and 70%, which means that at least 30% of our customers will call us. Additionally, quite a few customers who book online will follow it up with a phone call, or we’ll call them. Almost all customers will speak to us at some point in their journey.”

Marc Bainbridge, Head of Operations

The decision to implement CardEasy

Quite simply, we wanted to protect our clients’ payment card data and we wanted to be PCI DSS compliant. The standard operating procedure at the time meant that the company wasn’t fully PCI DSS compliant as we were capturing customers credit card details verbally over the phone and that’s a risk for them and it’s a risk for us as well. It just simply made sense to bring in a specialist solution like CardEasy to help us meet our business requirements.”

The process of implementing CardEasy

“It was very smooth. We had a couple of problems initially, but the problems weren’t anything to do with CardEasy. Your guys gave us a first-class level of service, first-class responses, they’re all first-class professionals. We had a few challenges with one of our other partners – again nothing to do with CardEasy – and once those were sorted out everything went extremely smoothly. There were no issues, at all. There was no configuration for us to do. It’s very simple.”

The benefits of implementing CardEasy

The cost associated with demonstrating PCI DSS compliance has fallen dramatically since CardEasy was implemented.

“We can just literally say, “Here is the certificate, and here’s the solution that we use.” It saves us a huge amount of time compared to what was necessary before we implemented CardEasy.”

Call volumes to Hurtigruten’s contact centers have increased as a result of the pandemic and its staff switched to working from home at extremely short notice, introducing some challenges in terms of customer experience and also in terms of maintaining contact center security.

“We introduced working from home very quickly for a lot of people. Fortunately, CardEasy is all cloud-based which made it very easy to do.

We did have security concerns when our contact center agents started working remotely. The fact that we had already implemented CardEasy made the process easier because it means that we are no longer asking our customers to provide their payment card details to our contact center agents.”

Would Hurtigruten recommend CardEasy to other organizations?

Yes, we would. I’ve actually just had a conversation today about CardEasy. Every year you always get asked the question when it comes to the contractual side of the relationship, or the contract is coming up for renewal, “Do you want to continue?” My answer is always “Why wouldn’t we?” It’s quite simple. The CardEasy team answer our calls every time we need help, no matter what time of the day it is. I’ve had calls with the support team late at night, early in the morning, weekends. They offer the level of service that we need. They offer the protection our customers need and that’s what it’s all about.”

  • "The main benefit for us is that our customers know that their card details are safe. We don't store their card details in any way. It's all about giving our customers that peace of mind. As a contact center agent, if you call and make a booking with me, I don’t have access to your card details. You don't have to worry about your card details being fraudulently used by somebody because they are never exposed. The benefit for us is the customer's peace of mind."