TMP Direct

12/31/2022

12/24/2022

Merry Christmas!

10/10/2022

A glimpse into Customer Service Week 2022!
Here at TMP, we celebrated Customer Service Week from October 3 to 7, in appreciation of the hard work and dedication of TMP Direct staff, our clients and their customers. Kicking off the week, we had Coworker Appreciation Day on October 3, with thoughtful messages to let a coworker know how much you appreciate all that they do. Following up, October 4 was Autumn Dessert Day, with people donning their favorite color of autumn and sharing their favorite fall dessert. October 5 was Band Spirit Day with everyone dressing up in their favorite sports jersey or band/group shirt. Next was Employee Appreciation Lunch on October 6, with pizza for everyone. To wind up the week of celebration, we had Work Selfie Day/Appreciation Breakfast on October 7, with people taking selfies at their desk and relishing bagels in the office. All in all, it was one hell of a week, with a whirlwind of celebration!

06/30/2022

June 21 officially marked the beginning of Summer! At TMP, we celebrated the day with a Welcome Summer Party. We dressed up in our favorite summer attire to beat the heat. We had a team lunch followed by an ice cream sundae party. There was even a raffle of summer fun essentials. At TMP, we work hard and play hard. Creating memories with our work family!

01/25/2022

Happy Republic Day from TMP!

01/17/2022

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

12/31/2021

Happy New Year from TMP!

12/24/2021

Merry Christmas from TMP!

11/25/2021

Why PCI compliance is crucial

Data security and privacy are today a prime focus for most organizations globally. While there have been several regulations and standards introduced to improve data security, the evolving landscape makes it challenging for organizations to stay compliant. For many, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) are the first topics that come to mind when privacy is concerned.

PCI DSS refers to a combination of requirements that make sure all companies that store, process, or transmit credit card information provide an environment for their customers' data that is safe and secure. PCI DSS is composed of helpful rules and guidelines that keep sellers and their customers safer. It was first introduced as an official regulation in 2006, by major credit card companies such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

The PCI DSS is not a regulation per se, and it does not supersede local or regional laws, government regulations, or other legal requirements. However, it has become the financial services industry standard for information security, and compliance is a prerequisite for working with global payment card brands. In 2020, US consumers reported losing more than $3.3 billion to fraud—an increase of nearly $1.5 billion compared to 2019.

Improving the data security of card payment systems is the job of the PCI Security Standards Council. They make available standards and materials that incorporate tools, measurements, frameworks, and resources to support organizations as they endeavor to uphold cardholder information security. The council uses PCI DSS as a framework for creating comprehensive payment card security processes that allow for the detection and prevention of and response to security issues.

A Qualified Security Assessor will verify all technical information given by the merchant or service provider, use independent judgment to confirm the standard has been met, provide support and guidance during the compliance process, adhere to the PCI Data Security Standard Assessment Procedures, validate the scope of the assessment, evaluate compensating controls and produce the final report on compliance.

While the cost of attaining PCI compliance varies depending on what you already have in place, the cost of not being compliant is considerable. The cost of non-compliance is best determined by calculating the cost of a security breach. Although fines are not published for the public, they can be steep. They tend to be between $5,000 and $100,000 for each month you are out of compliance. This holds true for both on-premises and cloud systems.

PCI compliance involves 12 distinct requirements, all of which are designed to enhance security. They are as follows: install a firewall and maintain it, initiate strong password protections, protect the data of cardholders, encrypt data that gets transmitted, install and maintain antivirus software, update your software, restrict access to data, establish unique IDs for those with access, limit physical access needs, establish and maintain access logs, scan and perform tests to identify vulnerabilities and document your policies.

The problem for most large retailers is that they treat security controls as being a 'tick box', where once a year they show their PCI QSA that they have the policies, processes, and technologies. But only focusing on an annual compliance assessment can create a false sense of security. Investigators have realized that security controls used by organizations that had passed an assessment were often out of compliance when breaches occurred later.

According to Verizon’s 2020 Payment Security Report, an astounding 72 percent of all organizations assessed on PCI DSS compliance failed an interim validation. That means that, although they had achieved 100 percent compliance in a previous assessment, only 28 percent were able to maintain that level of compliance in between assessments. In the past decade’s worth of these annual reports, the best performance was reported in 2017, when 55 percent of organizations were found in full compliance.

Thankfully, new technologies are available to help manage scope and minimize risk all year long. Identifying sensitive data is the fundamental first step, followed by accurate classification and intelligent data protection. The more you automate and integrate these steps in one continuous, policy-driven process, the more effective your data protection, compliance, and risk reduction efforts — and the less disruptive they are to business users.

TMP’s role
TMP meets PCI compliance requirements to make sure we are handling all customer and client information in a safe and secure manner. As digital outreach evolves in chat and self-service offerings, TMP is able to keep up and learn these new features as they develop. PCI compliance reinforces our security and best practices in managing technology and privacy.

11/11/2021

Looking beyond the NPS

‘On a scale of 0–10, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague?’ We’ve all seen the pop-ups as we work away in web-based applications or the requests in email messages we receive from vendors asking us to rate their software or service. It’s all part of an organization’s effort to calculate that all-important net promoter score (NPS).

NPS was developed and trademarked by Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld in 2003. Reichheld claimed in the Harvard Business Review that it was the “one number you need to grow” when he introduced the concept. NPS is a metric that measures customer satisfaction with a company, with scores ranging from -100 to 100.

The score falls into three groups. If a customer scores you as a nine or a 10, they are promoters. If they score you as a seven or an eight, they are passive. You don’t know if they are leaning toward loving you, leaving you, or they just don’t care. And, a score of a six or lower means you have a detractor. To calculate, you subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters, and divide it by the total number of respondents times 100.

NPS is a polarizing statistic. On one hand, there’s a cult that believes it’s the chosen metric, one customer-experience number to rule them all. On the other, there’s a group that sees a vanishingly thin and arbitrary line between a ‘promoter’ and a ‘passive,’ which can cause massive scoring differences. The truth lies somewhere between. NPS is far from perfect, but used in combination with other customer-experience metrics it can add real value to your view of the customer journey and how your customers feel regarding your brand.

Satisfied customers are less likely to leave your brand, which means there should be an inverse correlation between NPS and churn rate. Customers who score as promoters should also reduce churn in a second way if they follow through on their willingness to advocate on your behalf, because customers who were referred to a brand are also less likely to leave it.

An NPS campaign is an easy way to check the box that you have done something to quantify customer satisfaction. But, it’s just another example of our move to automation at scale. We’re asking our customers to have conversations with chatbots or respond to an impersonal pop-up instead of actually interacting with them. And we can lose out on a ton of customer insight when we optimize those one-on-one discussions out of existence.

When you fall back on NPS scores, you may only get superficial information that measures your customer’s sentiments during a very brief moment in time. You can miss out on the critical, nuanced conversations that can uncover how they’re really feeling regarding a particular feature, function or experience. That’s why those NPS scores are just the starting point. Once they’re in, it’s time to go old-school and pick up a phone.

It’s mind-boggling that companies would rely on NPS as a key management metric when you consider that the score doesn’t explain why a customer would recommend the firm, doesn’t take into account consumer demographics and it measures intention, not behavior. Yet, organizations use NPS scores to drive all kinds of business initiatives — from new product launches to customer service efforts and even executive compensation packages.

NPS doesn’t tell you what you need to fix. It is only an indicator of how likely a customer is to recommend you in the moment. If they give you a bad score, it’s unclear exactly why they did, so it’s difficult to understand how you can improve the situation in the future. Likewise, if they give you a great score, it cannot often be discerned from that single metric what element or multiple elements contributed to their experience. With a single question, it’s hard to know. Asking for a little more detail can go a long way in understanding NPS ratings.

Also, having diagnostic analytics throughout your sales and product usage process can feed you information that can help you understand what might be happening. For instance, if the time to complete an e-commerce transaction suddenly doubles because of server errors, and you see your NPS scores plummet, you can very easily correlate these things.

TMP’s role
Here at TMP, we believe the voice of the customer is arguably the most important feedback that a business can receive. We value continuous learning as it leads to a profitable improvement. Customers leave feedback at the end of the call or receive an email regarding their experience and we calculate and analyze the needs of the business based on numbers.