Customer Service Security – 8 Effective Tactics for 2025

Aksheeta Tyagi and Ruchi Madan at Sprinklr explore the growing importance of customer service security and provide best practices to help agents protect both customer trust and enterprise data integrity.

Customer service agents are more than just problem solvers – they’re also custodians of sensitive customer data, making security a critical aspect of their work.

With hacking attempts increasingly targeting customer service systems, agents must be proactive in recognizing threats and safeguarding sensitive data.

The 2024 Cybersecurity Report by Accenture claims 70% of organizations cite customer service as a major vulnerability in their security strategy.

As trusted points of contact between the business and its customers, agents are uniquely positioned to detect and respond to potential threats.

What Is Customer Service Security?

Customer service security is a combination of strategies, processes and measures a business adopts to protect the customer service operation of their business.

As cyber threats evolve, and customer data becomes more valuable, prioritizing security within your brand’s customer service operations cannot be stressed enough.

A customer service security program is designed to empower customer service organizations and teams with a proactive, comprehensive approach toward security resting on the following pillars:

• Data protection and privacy protocols
• Agent training and awareness
• Access control and authentication
• Incident management and response plan
• Secure communication channels
• Continuous monitoring and auditing
• Compliance with regulatory standards

Top 8 Ways to Upgrade Your Customer Service Security

You must prepare your agents to face any adverse security concerns, and your preparedness must be a part of a broader customer service strategy. Here are the top 8 ways to improve your customer service security.

1. Build a Customer Service Security Strategy

Not having a resilient customer service security strategy in place can create a huge issue for businesses – both small and large.

When you feel like everything is falling apart, having a defined strategy for customer service agents to fall back on can help them quickly get on top of the situation.

It also helps you understand the severity of the situation and the steps to take to prevent the issue from escalating further, such as assessing the severity, notifying relevant parties, working with security experts, etc.

You can create a knowledge base for customer service teams with customer data policies and guidelines. This will educate them about securely collecting and sharing customer data during customer service interactions.

2. Train and Educate Your Agents on Data Security

In its study, Verizon states that over 74% of data breaches have a human element, such as misuse, errors or social engineering.

This underscores the importance of training agents in the importance of data security and contact centre compliance. Building a culture of security must start from within your organization. You need to create learning programs and awareness campaigns for agents.

The focus must be on departments where customer interactions mostly occur – sales, customer service, billing, etc.

Creating training programs is only the first step. You should also evaluate the programs regularly, look at prevalent cybersecurity trends and tweak the training accordingly.

3. Educate Agents on Safe Ways of Communication

Many businesses are already working on educating their customers on the safest ways to interact with businesses, share sensitive information online and protect their login credentials.

You can make policies to have your contact centre agents remind the customers to communicate using official channels.

Build a culture of data security and privacy in the minds of your customers and your agents.

4. Regulate Agent Access and Modifications of Data

You must create systems to control agent access to customer data on a need-to-know basis. Access control systems enable businesses to reduce incidents of unauthorized access and misuse of customer data.

Access control and management systems let you quickly understand who accessed the data and when. You can also detect any modifications made to the data.

These proactive approaches can enhance customer service security and bolster brand trust among customers.

5. Provide Secure Systems to Share Sensitive Data on Calls

While your customer service team may not always require a customer’s personal information to solve an issue, it may be essential at other times.

Build systems and guidelines your customer service agent can use to securely collect these sensitive details. Hackers often use email to prey on vulnerable and unaware customers.

Therefore, discourage them from sending sensitive data like credit card numbers, passwords, social security, etc., in plain text via email. You must also train your agents not to request personal data unless necessary.

6. Add Security as a Part of Quality and Performance

As the drivers of customer support conversations, your agents must imbibe a security-conscious behaviour to ensure data security.

And adding it as part of your call centre quality monitoring and performance assessment can further improve its effectiveness.

Most customer service agents would want to keep their performance up. Ensure the changes do not affect their performance negatively.

7. Build Security Into Your Customer Service Systems

Relying on your customer service agents to manually follow the guidelines and protocols may not work in all scenarios. And it may also not be the most secure approach in the long term. Hence, build processes that help the agents follow the established guidelines.

You can rely on AI-powered process suggestions and knowledge bases to ensure better security of customer data during customer calls.

8. Instruct Agents to Report Any Security or Data Privacy Concerns

Like all companies, your data security program is not impenetrable. Hence, when any security concerns arise, educate your agents on how to escalate and report internally to the proper teams.

When it comes to security issues, it’s important to escalate quickly and to the right people so that the issue can be resolved before causing a major impact for your organisation.

Monitor These Risks to Avoid Security Failures

Security failures can happen at any time. But if you can monitor for common risks and put systems in place to address such failures quickly, you can prevent them from causing irreparable damage to your business.

Here are common risks you must monitor for:

Social Engineering Attacks

Phishing is the most common security risk used to obtain sensitive information from customer support agents.

An attacker may use phone calls, deceptive emails, or chat messages to trick customer service agents into sharing customer information. Attackers might also impersonate customers or business employees to access secure details.

The best way to protect your business from such attacks is to have thorough email filtering systems and technologies. Having customer self-service options is also a great way to eliminate the risks altogether.

Privilege Mismanagement & Insufficient Access Controls

In large enterprises, customer service agents often have access to sensitive customer data, making proper access controls essential to security.

However, the sheer scale of operations in these organizations can lead to mismanagement of access privileges. In some cases, agents may be granted excessive or unnecessary access to sensitive data or systems beyond their role requirements, increasing the risk of internal misuse or data breaches.

Additionally, if access rights are not regularly reviewed and updated, former employees or contractors might retain unauthorised access.

This lack of strict role-based access control (RBAC) or insufficient access management can create significant vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Sprinklr – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Sprinklr
Reviewed by: Megan Jones