The Complete Guide to WeChat Backup

Here’s how to backup and save your WeChat business communications, ensuring that your organization remains in compliance and your company is protected in the event of a future dispute or regulatory crackdown.

WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and others have grown from casual platforms for friends to exchange instant messages to a forum frequently used by businesses to field customer queries and strengthen their relationships with their clients. WeChat, China’s leading social platform with some 1 billion monthly users, has also joined the ranks of instant messaging channels being increasingly used for customer communications by enterprises.

But along with the convenience of WeChat messaging for enterprises come significant risks. Companies must ensure that they keep a complete digital record of all WeChat communications between clients and employeesThis can pose a major challenge when considering all the moving parts created by individual users conducting conversations across both company and personal devices.

Wondering exactly how to backup WeChat messages, and why it’s necessary to do so? 

Here’s how to make sure that all WeChat conversations between your employees and clients are saved, ensuring that your organization can remain in compliance and paving the way for smarter business decisions.

WeChat backup and WeChat compliance – what’s the connection?

 

While WeChat messages may feel like a more casual forum for conversations between your organization’s employees and clients, they can also create a dangerous, false sense that communications taking place over the app aren’t official business communications.

WeChat conversations are subject to the same regulatory standards as any other form of business communications, meaning that they must be responsibly stored in a manner that can be read and reviewed in the future by a supervisory body. 

Specific rules around the length of time that companies must store WeChat and other business-related messages varies by jurisdiction. But for companies operating in regulated industries across the globe, it’s safe to assume that these organizations cannot delete business communications, and are legally required to keep a record of these conversations.

Backing up your employees’ WeChat conversations is a key step for remaining in compliance, and failure to do so can result in serious consequences for both your company’s bottom line and good name.

Why WeChat archiving matters

 

Whether a conversation is taking place over official company email, SMS, or WeChat instant messaging, all business communications in regulated industries, such as finance, must be saved. 

Nearly every country has specific rules stating that company conversations must be accessible in the case of a regulatory crackdown, and pleading ignorance about compliance for conversations happening on instant messaging platforms won’t spare your business from potential multi million dollar fines and damage to brand reputation.

Having an instantly accessible archive of all interactions between your employees and clients is also important for protecting your business in case of a future disagreement. With individuals able to delete specific messages and craft a false narrative, a backup provides a minute-by-minute breakdown of a conversation that can provide a source of truth when it’s needed most.

This complete story can help you quickly resolve disputes and misunderstandings, as well as help protect your business in the event of a lawsuit or litigation. 

So how do you go about creating a comprehensive WeChat archive?

How to archive WeChat messages

 

There are two ways to backup WeChat messages – manually and via a third-party, automated system. While both these methods will result in a saved record of a user’s WeChat message history, there are major differences in terms of time and effort, as well as accuracy.

Manual WeChat chat backup

 

Users can manually store their WeChat messages by accessing the platform through its website. After downloading the WeChat app for desktop, users log in with their credentials, then choose “backup and restore” in the settings panel. 

From there, users select where they’d like the backup to be stored – on their local PC drive – and then they choose which chats they want to archive. A stable WiFi connection is needed for successful saving and backup.

However, there are a number of serious drawbacks to this method of archiving. It requires each individual user to take initiative and go through these steps on a regular basis, each time that they wish to back up conversations. That means that in between backups, if a user deletes a message, that communication is lost forever, with no recourse or even a notification that such an action occurred. 

Additionally, the backup is saved to a user’s PC. If that device crashes or is physically lost, that backup is gone right along with it. Disgruntled employees could simply take the device with them when leaving a company, or delete it from the computer’s hard drive. 

Such scenarios defeats the entire purpose of creating a WeChat archive – having a digital record of communications conducted over the platform that’s easily accessible to your organization.

Considering that the accuracy and accessibility of manual backups depend on users behaving responsibly, you need to decide what level of risk your organization is willing to take on by essentially designating this critical procedure as the responsibility of individuals. 

Even the best intentioned employees are fallible and make mistakes at times. Are you comfortable with leaving compliance — a critical aspect of your business — potentially vulnerable to human error?

 

Automated WeChat archiving

 

For a comprehensive backup of all WeChat messages that isn’t dependent upon the actions of individual users and takes the guesswork out of ensuring that backups regularly occur, a third-party, automated archiving solution is the answer.

LeapXpert, a responsible business communications platform, keeps track of business conversations taking place across multiple platforms, including WeChat, in real time – no manual updates necessary. The solution creates a comprehensive digital record of all messaging conversations between your organization’s employees and clients. 

This all-encompassing archive is accessible to you even if employees lose their devices or leave your company. Any messages deleted from individual devices will still remain in your master backup. This gives you unparalleled ownership over critical data, so that you can best protect your business in the event of a future dispute, litigation, or regulatory investigation.

For more on making WeChat archiving simple and painless for your organization, get in touch with us! We’d love to show you how archiving instant messaging can fit into your business’ unique compliance infrastructure.