Archiving Electronic Communications For Business Value
By Mike Pagani, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist, Smarsh
It’s no secret email and social media archiving can be used to ease the compliance headache of meeting regulatory, privacy, and e-discovery requirements. But the real potential value it affords remains largely undiscovered.
According to the Smarsh annual compliance survey for 2016, as firms aim to demonstrate their “culture of compliance,” the role of electronic communication supervision is growing beyond the retain and respond checkbox. Compliance teams are taking a seat at the table to help manage overall corporate risk alongside other departments including IT, marketing, and HR. With the mandate expanding stakes getting higher, resources are not keeping up, putting additional strain on the compliance function.
More than 87 percent of respondents expect resources (time and/or money) dedicated to electronic message compliance will remain the same or increase only slightly in the next 12 months. Less than 10 percent expect to receive a significant resource increase. Unsurprisingly, this concerns compliance professionals. More than one-fourth of respondents (28 percent) cited insufficient budgets as a top concern this year, up from 22 percent last year. Likewise, 34 percent of respondents cited insufficient human resources as a top concern, up from 30 percent last year.
As social and digital channels and content types become more sophisticated and widely adopted, it is apparent they can also be used to enhance productivity and create opportunity. Comprehensive, automated archiving solutions that capture, supervise, and retain electronic communications in a search-ready state can also offer firms considerable benefits beyond compliance.
Four key benefits of archiving that can add significant business advantage include:
1.Understanding The Impact Of Communications
Having a clear picture of what firms are doing well can reinforce strengths and successes. To discover new synergies and insights, businesses need to be able to listen as an organization. All firms, for example, should be able to analyze and track how quickly and effectively their sales and services teams reply to customer communications and what language is most effective.
2.Managing Risk
The holistic oversight enabled by comprehensive archiving solutions can reduce the risk of dark corners in firms. In other words, those environments where remote teams, third party suppliers, or unmonitored social media accounts could wreak havoc with corporate reputation, business outcomes, or service delivery.
For example, an effective archiving solution with policy-driven supervision functionality can identify rogue employees, dissatisfied customers, and potentially negative incidents before irreversible damage occurs. Both customer and employee mentions of competitor brand names, products, and services can be tagged and analyzed for any concerning trends, ultimately enhancing competitive intelligence efforts.
3.Quantifying And Analyzing Unstructured Data
Many archiving services can track the basic metrics of communications efforts. Nowadays, it is fairly straightforward to compile likes, shares, follows, and mentions on social media platforms. But most social media activity produces unstructured data and communication (text, pictures, photos, videos) that won’t fit neatly into a relational database. This data is much more powerful and meaningful when retained in its native format and proper context enabling rich and granular search later on. Automating the collection and indexing of this data means businesses can measure things like product and service quality, or the quality of leads and relationships created by social media efforts.
4.Future Proofing
By casting a wide enough net and storing the captured data in a secure, reliable, and search-ready fashion, firms can keep their proverbial finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, market trends, and emerging challenges. They can also document successes and build on them in timely fashion.
By actively seeking to understand the nuances of the market through the lens of communications, businesses will be able to respond much quicker to unexpected developments. Not only does this allow the collection and scrutiny of data to solve today’s challenges, it also enables advisers to future-proof their business.
Comprehensive, automated archiving is a powerful strategic tool. Businesses are best placed to use it to drive business growth and gain advantage over competitors who don’t have the tools to mine and leverage their data gold dwelling within unstructured communications data.
Read the recent Osterman Research report Next-Generation Archiving: Extracting Intelligence from your Electronic Archives to learn how to get more from your message archives.
Mike Pagani is a seasoned IT professional and recognized subject matter expert in the areas of mobility, identity and access management, network security and virtualization. Prior to joining Smarsh in November 2014, Pagani held executive-level corporate and technology leadership/spokesperson roles for Stay-Linked, Quest Software, NComputing, Dell Software and others.