Don't Forget that Chat Must be Recorded, Too
January 08, 2015
By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor
Chat. We like to minimize chat as a communications medium for the margins; a quick and off-handed way to communicate little bits of information. Yet we use chat for more than just the long tail of a conversation; it is part of our integrated communications buffet, and we turn to it for substantive interactions more than most of us might want to admit.
The U.S. government recognizes that chat is used for substantive communication, too; the Sarbanes-Oxley Act classifies instant messages as “correspondence,” and therefore subject to the same regulations as email.
The byproduct of this classification is that firms subject to Sarbanes-Oxley must store their chat logs for a period of no less than three years, just like email. Other regulations, such as the Dodd-Frank Act, also affect chat in the same way that it does email.
While there are reasons for businesses to be storing and searching chat logs even if they are not required to do so by law, such as gaining full visibility into the business data communicated by their employees, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley sure make it a necessity to take chat seriously from a compliance perspective.
Thankfully, storing chat is already something that solutions such as ISI (News - Alert) and Verba Technologies make possible.
Chat conversations can be displayed using the same interface as voice and video recordings, and these chats can be searched and shown in a timeline view for easier comprehension.
Chat recording and archiving solutions can go much further, too, however. As with voice recording, chat recording can be selectively activated to capture interactions that are subject to compliance issues, and ignore those that are not. Content also can be selectively filtered so only important conversations are stored, an important feature for companies that rely heavily on chat.
Real-time monitoring of chat conversations also can be useful. Much the same as real-time call monitoring, it is possible for managers to monitor chat conversations to ensure compliance or discover emerging issues.
Chat is often marginalized, but it plays an important role in our communication diet. As such, these conversations should be recorded and stored just the same as other corporate communications. This is especially the case with firms that must follow strict compliance mandates.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi