Why are invisible conversations a risk to enterprises?

Data. Data is king. Over the past few years, analytics, digital transformation, sophisticated digital marketing have all meant that enterprises know more about their business and their customers at an intimate, targeted level than ever. But what happens when a whole channel of customer data is sitting outside your corporate walls in a messaging application like WhatsApp and WeChat? Essentially a conversation that is invisible to the enterprise?

With these channels becoming more prevalent, more customer and client conversations are being held on messaging applications. As the interactions increase, the amount of data contained in these conversations also increases. Leading to more data being invisible to the enterprise.

What’s the Risk with invisible conversations?

The risk for these invisible conversations is three-fold. First there are compliance issues. Many industries have requirements to record, monitor and recall customer conversations for compliance, data privacy or consent reasons. If that conversation is sitting on an ex-employee’s personal WhatsApp account, then the company cannot deliver that information to any regulator or customer.

Secondly, for analytics purposes. If a business has data is sitting on a messaging application that is not linked into their enterprise’s analytics tools, then their analytics is not based on a complete view of their customer’s journey or data. If the data is invisible, then it can’t be used to move the business forward.

Conversations with customers, conversations that contain data are vital to making smart business decisions, to delivering customers with the kind of personalized, engaged experience they expect.

Thirdly, enterprises need more than visibility to these tools, they need to be able to control these conversations as necessary to their industry – ethnical walls and data leakage prevention (DLP) for example are important tools for many regulated industries. If a conversation is invisible to the enterprise, then obviously there are no proactive controls on the conversation. The enterprise is not in control of the conversation or the participants in them.

To achieve all this an enterprise needs a platform that brings invisible conversations inside the corporate walls and is centralized, mobile-first, and interoperable.

Centralized

Ideally all messaging applications should be held within one system rather than multiple systems for individual applications. This is particularly important as the messaging application market has shown signs of fragmentation and as less popular applications like Signal and Telegram gain traction. Different platforms may have been sustainable when there were a small number of messaging applications used by customers but as the number increases, a centralized platform gives customers more choice, employees less manual work and enterprises more options for control, visibility and interconnectivity.
A centralized platform also ensures that employees don’t need to use personal messaging accounts. Therefore, surveillance is focused on business conversations rather than on their personal accounts.

Mobile-first and People-friendly

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the way that employees work changed. More people are working remotely or moving to a hybrid model. This is true of employees and clients. A McKinsey report released in August 2020 showed that 38% of respondents expected their employees to work two or more days a week remotely when offices open.
A conversational solution that is mobile-first will be vital in this new model of working. If the tool is not conducive to the new way of work, employees will default to something that is. Resulting in conversations outside of corporate tools and walls. Similarly, if the tool is not easy-to-use or familiar, employees and customers will find an easier way to communicate, resulting in invisible conversations.

Interoperable

As more conversations are held in messaging applications, ensuring that these conversations are visible into other business-critical applications will be central to closing the loop on the enterprise’s data journey. If these conversations – intimate, conversational and rich in behavioral data – cannot be easily visible to an enterprise’s business tools then there are a large blind spots of customer interactions, important for business decisions and customer mapping.
Many businesses have surveillance and governance requirements for regulatory reasons. Seamless integrations and proactive control help enterprises manage these conversations within the rapidly-changing regulatory requirements and customer preference shifts.

Futureproof

As we saw earlier this year with Signal and Telegram, customers can shift their preferred application quickly and without warning. The solution needs the ability to easily and seamlessly on board new, emergent messaging applications to enable the enterprise to avoid new channels of invisible conversations as customers (and so employees) shift their channel preferences.

LeapXpert’s Federated Messaging Platform (FMOP) is explicitly designed and built to be a centralized, mobile-first, interoperable system that brings invisible conversations held between employees and clients inside corporate walls. FMOP makes these conversations not only visible but exposes them as the rich data source that they are to popular business tools.

As the co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin said “The world is now awash with data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.” Invisible conversations on messaging applications make consumers less clear and potentially put enterprises at regulatory risk. Delivering an easy-to-use solution for employees, understanding where conversations are, managing them and appropriately utilizing them to make better business decision is going to be central to enterprises that want to be agile in the new normal.

Talk to LeapXpert’s team of experts to find out how we can help your business contact us.

Learn more about the pros and cons of messaging applications for enterprises