Text messaging is indeed one of the most crucial tools used across the business sector. From government agencies to financial services industry, most employees find texting as the most efficient and affordable way to keep connected with their colleagues and customers; it is a channel that virtually everyone uses on a daily basis, and as such, promoting its use in the workplace has become a reality for many organizations.
But the significant gains from mobile texting in the workplace also come with major challenges. With employees likely sending business information through their personal devices, moderating and managing those communications can be challenging. And since employees also tend to text their colleagues outside of the office, ensuring that all those mobile SMSs are compliant with company’s and regulators’ standards present key tests for compliance officers.
To guarantee corporate transparency, compliance with regulatory requirements, and an efficient eDiscovery process, companies and organizations should capture and retain mobile SMS. By doing so, if a party requires the records of business-related communications, the organization can reproduce them with ease – even if the actual conversations have already been deleted in the employee’s mobile device.
The True Cost of Manual Mobile Text Archiving
All that said, the question still remains – how exactly can you capture mobile SMS that contains pertinent information about your business?
Despite the presence of new compliance solutions, many organizations still resort to requiring their employees to screenshot their text messages and save the image files on their work PC and submit those to the compliance department in a predetermined interval period.
While it’s better than doing nothing at all or banning text messaging in the workplace, this manual process is not effective nor ideal for regulated companies and organizations. Manually archiving text messages is not only cumbersome for employees and expensive for the employer, but it could also lead the organization to greater regulatory and legal risk.
Simply requiring the employees to screenshot their business text messages might seem like free for the company, but it comes with a hidden cost.
According to the jobsite ZipRecruiter, the national average salary for a broker-dealer is $89,826 annually. Subtracting the weekends, public holidays, vacation time, and paid leave, a broker-dealer is left with at least 235 actual working days every year. Divide $89,826 by 235 days and eight hours – a broker-dealer earns around $48 per hour.
If they have to manually screengrab all their mobile SMS, they could easily be spending at least an hour a day to complete the task. At $48 per hour, that manual process of capturing and retaining mobile SMS will cost the company $240 per week, $960 per month, and $11,520 per year.
And this cost only includes the actual screenshotting the conversations. It does not include the time it will take to transfer all the images into the employee’s work computer, the time it will take for the compliance department to transfer those files into the official database, and the cost it would require if a regulatory or legal body request for specific records of conversations, which would take extremely significant time as the compliance personnel would have to read all the text content in all the image files to find the exact requested record.
The Solution: Real-Time and Automated Mobile SMS Archiver
Considering what manual mobile SMS archiving can cost a company or organization, having a robust automated archiving solution is the only feasible option to stay compliant. By automating the process, employees will have more time on more meaningful tasks, and the company will be able to save a significant amount of resources that it can use to further improve their service to their customers.
With a compliance solutions provider like TeleMessage, your organization will be able to capture and retain mobile SMS, voice calls, emails, WhatsApp chats and call,and other types of mobile content in real-time from all your employees’ device. In doing so, you can stay compliant with relevant regulations, ensure the productivity of your employees, and have more efficient control over all the business-related communications that your organization produces during its course of operations – allowing you to provide them to the regulators as soon as they requested for it.
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text and calls archiving for Corporate and BYOD phones. Visit our website today at www.telemessage.com to learn more about how we can help your organization stay compliant with the privacy implications of different text archiving and call recording regulations.
