3 Instant Messaging Monitoring Software Must-Haves

Here’s what your monitoring software must provide so that you can maintain critical ownership of business critical information.

 

As a business operating amidst a two-year-long global pandemic, it’s clear that you understand the importance of a mobile-first approach and the power of instant messaging solutions for your company. From easier access to colleagues to smoother communication and superior customer service for your clients, messaging apps have now gone from a perk to an industry standard for enterprises of all sizes. 

 

Simply signing up for a Slack plan isn’t enough — your clients and employees are chatting over a rich array of mediums, including WhatsApp, Telegram, and social media apps like Instagram Direct Messenger and Facebook Messenger. If you’ve enabled chat across all those channels, great! And if you’ve obtained a solution that ensures end-to-end encryption and other security measures are firmly in place to protect your brand and customers, that’s even better.

 

But for truly secure instant messaging for your business, you need monitoring and surveillance software that ensures compliance with regulatory standards for your industry, eases archiving and record keeping, and provides you with insight as to what exactly sensitive information pertaining to your business is being discussed, both between colleagues and with clients.

 

Here are the three absolute must-haves for your instant message monitoring software, so that you can maintain critical ownership of data pertaining to your company’s reputation, internal affairs, and more.

Governance and control

 

While the word “monitoring” might sound scary, it actually means protecting both your brand’s reputation and your bottom line. Corporate instant messaging is, by its very nature, a business conversation, not a personal discussion. It’s your right to know what exactly is being said when your employees are speaking on behalf of your business, whether it’s to their colleagues or clients.

 

Communication monitoring is the key to ensuring that everything from upcoming investments to sensitive trade secrets remain under wraps until the time is right. And monitoring instant messages also means that if data leaks out, you can act quickly in real-time to stymie the spread of the information and launch damage control efforts. 

 

This level of control and visibility into your business’ conversations is the most valuable defense you can give yourself against potential disaster. The only way that you can shape the narrative about your brand is if you know what messages are being transmitted from the inside out. 

 

While it’s easier to blame external entities for bad press or industry rumors, it may be the case that leaks are coming from within your organization. Arm yourself with the right tools to defend yourself and swiftly respond if need be.

Archiving, surveillance, and compliance

 

A comprehensive digital paper trail is critical for everything from protecting yourself in the event of future litigation to providing a blow-by-blow series of events that proves your good-faith compliance to investigators if there’s a regulatory crackdown. The only way that you’ll gain the protection of a full set of records around your enterprise messaging conversations is by frequent archiving. Leaving the massive responsibility of archiving up to your employee simply won’t cut it. 

 

You need to take the burden off your teams and give yourself the confidence of knowing that messages will never disappear due to an employee deleting a conversation or leaving your company. Manual archiving is arduous and puts the onus onto your employees not to make everyday, human errors. If archiving depends on them, they’ll need to remember to engage in a multi-step process to save all their business-related conversations. An automated archiving service for messages is the best solution to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

 

As a number of high-profile compliance failures have resulted in multimillion dollar fines and intense regulatory scrutiny, you should embrace automated archiving and monitoring solutions for your company communication platform. Compliance can be the make-or-break factor between serious reputational and financial consequences, or powerfully supporting your company’s side of the story in a crisis.

Seamless integration and deployment

 

It’s one thing to do your due diligence and find the most impressive instant messaging monitoring software for your business, replete with all the bells and whistles. But it’s an entirely different beast to find a solution that doesn’t require a Herculean effort to integrate into your existing IT and IS structures, and doesn’t have a roll-out time that will mean weeks or months go by before you can actually start benefiting from the product.

 

Be sure to check if your potential communication monitoring system is compatible with each and every instant messaging platform used by your company, especially if you’re a multinational enterprise. Think regional-specific apps, like WeChat, which some solutions won’t cover. A multi-platform solution, which includes everything from WhatsApp to Telegram to Slack to iMessages, is critical for a big-picture perspective and proper, thorough record keeping.

 

Not all solutions are created equal

 

Let’s break it down. Your message monitoring software needs to provide you with total ownership and control of company discussions, a comprehensive digital paper trail, and can be easily integrated with other programs that your teams use. LeapXpert provides you with all of those must-haves, and more, all in one user-friendly, easy to integrate platform.

 

A responsible business communication platform, LeapXpert provides you with unparalleled visibility into all company-related conversations, regardless of the platform. The solution provides a major boost to your compliance efforts, with automated archiving and greater transparency that ensures you’ll never lose messages or conversations. 

 

For more on what to look for when choosing an instant message monitoring solution, get in touch with us!