How Regulated Sectors Attain Peace of Mind with LeapXpert

Recently our VP Product, Sharvari Nerurkar, sat down to talk to UC Today reporter, Kieran Devlin, about how regulated industries attain peace of mind with LeapXpert. 

Watch it here: 

Below please find some highlights of their conversation. 

Before we explore about exactly how regulated sectors attain their peace of mind with LeapXpert. Sharvari, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey with LeapXpert?  

Yeah, sure. At LeapXpert, our mission is responsible business communication, which means we help businesses make sure that their employees can achieve client satisfaction and talk to their clients while also being compliant and communicating responsibly. I am the VP of Product Management and Design at LeapXpert, and I lead the product management and design teams here, working closely with customers and trying to solve some of their problems.  

Perfect. And before we examine a bit more of the specifics on LeapXpert’s solutions and how they support customers, can you please, give us maybe a state of the industry perspective status update on what would you say are the major challenges impacting regulated industries in 2024? 

Yeah, absolutely. I think the one consistent trend that we’ve been seeing year after year for the last few years that I do not see changing in 2024 or even in the future years is the regulated authorities continuing to enforce some of these compliance regulations where financial services firms and brokerages and banks are required to maintain a copy of their conversation with their customers.  

The regulation has been out there for several years. A few years ago, the authorities started bringing down fines and that trend has just not let up.  

I think a few days ago, FINRA fined Dawson James Securities, which is a small security firm, half a million dollars for not keeping their conversations with their customers and not preserving those conversations. So we are seeing this trend where it’s not just the big banks that are being scrutinized and fined, but also smaller firms. It doesn’t matter what size you are and how big you are. FINRA and other authorities are coming down hard on this. And this is not just a US thing, it’s a global phenomenon. I think everyone wants to make sure that critical conversations in these regulated sectors are preserved and are available, you know, for e-discovery and other purposes later. And like I said, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  

And naturally, as you say, LeapXpert’s mission is to provide solutions to these challenges. So can you please tell us a little bit about LeapXpert, Microsoft Teams solution for now, and how it assists Teams customers and regulated industries to achieve the peace of mind we talked about on the compliance front and beyond.  

Yeah. Before we get to Microsoft Teams, I think I’ll give a quick overview of how LeapXpert helps its customers. Imagine you’re a bank or a financial services institution. You have all your customers today on different messaging, using different messaging apps like iMessage, WhatsApp. If you’re in Asia, then it’s WeChat, WeCom, all of that. And typically, all these banks have taken the approach that because if we cannot regulate or capture these conversations, you’re not allowed to use them.  

But that doesn’t fly because people will find a way around. And when the customer messages you – what are you supposed to do?  

This results in a lot of client dissatisfaction because every time you’re asking them to either send you an email or something like that.  

LeapXpert allows these account managers and relationship managers to talk to their clients, whether it’s on WhatsApp or iMessage. Clients get responses very quickly. And at the same time, the IT admin gets peace of mind that all of these conversations are captured, compliant. governed, and so we sit in the middle and we federate these conversations on both sides.  

This now brings me to the Microsoft Teams solution. Talking to a lot of our customers, we realized that all of these employees are spending their day in Microsoft Teams for their internal communications because that’s how they communicate.  

Having them switch apps to talk to their clients was inefficient and included a lot of friction. We built a solution where Leap Work (We have a Leap Work app inside of Microsoft Teams using the Teams app development platform) that allows these employees to talk to their clients from within Microsoft Teams. And the clients on the receiving side get the message on whether it’s iMessage, WhatsApp, or WeChat, doesn’t matter. They get the message on their preferred client communication channel.  

And this is a huge, as you can imagine, time saver and productivity enhancement. So it was built with three outcomes in mind: The first is increased productivity for these employees. The second is peace of mind for IT admins. And the third is client satisfaction. And the solution meets all those three outcomes.  

And one of the things quite interesting when I was reading about the types of solutions you guys are working on, I believe that the service also enhances productivity. I wonder if you could give us a bit more detail on that specific front.  

Without the solution, what you’re doing is you’re talking to your colleagues in Microsoft Teams during the day. Then you’re switching your app, either pulling out your mobile phone or switching your app to talk to your clients. There is that constant friction of moving across apps. Plus the conversations you’re having are related. 

Because when you talk to your client, you come back and share that with your colleagues. Or if internally you have talked about some projects, you take that and share with your customers.  

But now with Microsoft, the Microsoft Teams solutions, you’re all in one canvas. It’s all right there. So you can have conversations without even leaving Teams and that way all the other things, like if you want to copy paste content, for example, or if you want to forward messages, things like that, they just become very quick and seamless and you can use your existing Microsoft Teams mobile app or your desktop app or even the browser app. and communicate with your clients without having to download anything else, switching your devices or apps. So it’s a huge productivity enhancement. It just takes that friction out of your experience.  

It’s really interesting. And I feel that’s absolutely going to be invaluable, especially as we introduce more and more complexities into people’s work lives. Another priority of your guys’ solution is client satisfaction. Can you please explore that? Obviously, at face value, that’s quite vague, but I understand you guys have a very specific definition that you’re really trying to address.  

Yeah, I think when it comes to client satisfaction, there’s a few things, like timeliness of response; whether you’re able to share information with the client, how are you able to sort of build a persona of the client so that you start understanding these clients.  

One thing to remember is all of these conversations are high touch, high value relationships. So these are relationships with high net worth individuals, with wealth managers and things like that.  

So these are not your typical call center or customer service scenarios. This is where people get to know each other and build relationships over the years. It is very important to get to know the person on the other side and build that persona, build that knowledge about them. 

With our solution, because it’s all available there, you have the chat history available there, you can go back and see your discussions. You can share files, for example. It’s all integrated into your day-to-day workflows. So that really helps you serve your clients better. You’re able to respond to them quickly because you’re not switching apps. And if you need any more context, the context is always available there. And it’s all available in the same solution that you use anyway for communication.  

And lastly, this will touch on what we discussed earlier it’s massively important having different communication channels all in one place. This touches what we discussed earlier with the streamlined processes, the streamlined workflows. But can you please, from your guys’ perspective, how important is it? Why is it important? And especially with messaging as one of those key communication channels.  

It’s that whole single pane of glass experience. It’s not just from the employee experience perspective, it’s also from the IT admin perspective. The more apps you have, the more canvases you have, the IT admin is stuck deploying them, doing user management, directory management, all of those things. Whereas when you have a solution that is integrated into Teams, it’s like you deploy once, then it’s available to your employees.  

You don’t have to do any training. You don’t have to train your users on how to use this new app. They just use Teams like they always do. So having that single pane of glass is great. Everyone is so tired of having one app for email, one app for internal communications, one app for external communications, and a fourth app for calendar.  

But if everything is integrated into Teams, it’s the same promise of Teams, but also apply to your client conversation. So I think it becomes very critical. It takes the stress out of, hey, where was that conversation now? Let me go find it. And then you’re going to bring it back to your internal… All of that stress gets reduced so you can actually focus on the work that matters.  

Absolutely. Just relating it to my own circumstances, it must be so exciting just to be able to just very easily pick things off, whether there’s files to inform this conversation or important details. It would really just make it so seamless and stress-free. Yeah, for sure.   

I think that’s all we’ve got time for today, but I’ve really enjoyed today’s session. So thank you, Sharvari, for being here.  

Thank you so much again for having me. I always enjoy conversations, Kiran.