Today, organizations communicate across more channels than ever. Email, instant messaging, collaboration tools, and voice calls all carry critical business conversations. To ensure compliance across these streams, regulated companies often rely on multiple vendors to capture data, whether for message-based or for voice communications.
In an increasingly data-heavy world, this segmented approach is becoming risky and inefficient. As Goutam Nadella, Chief Strategy Officer at Smarsh, explains, “You’re going to have to process, transform, and store data in multiple ways. That creates a lot of cost overruns and, most importantly, delays your business outcomes.”
With different processes in place, teams are forced to manage multiple workflows and different formats, slowing routine compliance processes and creating risk when synthesizing data across them.
Business does not happen in silos, and neither should compliance. Customers and employees move seamlessly between UC, email, text, and voice throughout the day. By seeking a single system that captures all channels, organizations can mirror that reality and reduce operational overhead.
The Costs of Fragmented Compliance
Using multiple compliance platforms has serious consequences that extend beyond auditing. The friction builds at every step as teams must search, export, and stitch together data across platforms. Similarly, when problems arise, teams must juggle numerous interfaces, handle multiple vendor support tickets, and navigate unique troubleshooting processes. For IT and risk teams, this often means spending more time administering tools than monitoring risk.
Disparate systems also create structural gaps that make monitoring difficult. Nadella warns, “Multiple unconnected systems raise the likelihood of missed alerts, unreviewed interactions, and noncompliant recordkeeping.”
Each vendor captures and stores data differently, making applying consistent retention policies or supervision rules across them challenging. The result can be missed critical interactions or deleted records if data is not synchronized between platforms.
Until recently, fragmentation was a necessary compromise. Voice communication was run on legacy telephony setups that were on-premises and difficult to integrate. But as Nadella notes, “Voice has evolved quite a bit. In the last five years, much of it has moved to the cloud.”
Now, modern cloud telephony combined with AI-driven transcription and unified data architectures makes it possible to capture voice alongside email, chat, and collaboration tools. This opens the door to the strengths a unified communications compliance platform can bring.
How Smarsh Stops Fragmentation
Smarsh demonstrates the new capabilities of a unified platform with its integration of CallCabinet. A certified partner for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco, and 8×8, CallCabinet integrates seamlessly with Smarsh’s text-based ecosystem, adding compliant call recording, AI transcription, speech analytics, sentiment detection, and automated quality assurance to it.
“We can now unify email, text, and voice data from across 100-plus channels into a single, compliance ecosystem that can record, analyze, and apply AI on all of that data,” says Nadella.
By unifying voice and text, operational friction disappears. Teams no longer need to log into numerous platforms to search records, reconcile data formats, or piece together audit trails that span different communication types. It also transforms supervision workflows, as all data is formatted the same, making retention policies consistent throughout and eliminating issues with automated recordkeeping.
Beyond operational efficiency, unification unlocks intelligence that fragmented systems cannot deliver. AI and analytics can work with the full communication landscape. This improves the ability to detect patterns, flag risks, and surface insights across the full communication stack. Teams also gain valuable new context by seeing the handover from voice to text, enhancing oversight.
Integration does not just simplify compliance, it transforms it. When all communication data flows through a single platform, organizations can move from reactive administration to proactive risk management, unlocking insights that improve monitoring, employee experience, and operational performance.
Future-Proofing Your Processes
The pace of technological change is accelerating. Communication tools are increasing, data volumes are growing, and regulatory expectations are evolving. Organizations relying on fragmented stacks will struggle to keep up. As Nadella puts it, “If you are trying to future-proof your institution, our view is that it’s no longer optional to have a fully integrated stack from a single provider. Otherwise, you’re always going to be chasing yesterday’s problem.”
A single provider gives companies the tools necessary for efficient compliance management while reducing licensing fees, IT support costs, integration expenses, and vendor management overhead. Companies can now spend less time managing tools, training users, or troubleshooting multiple systems, reallocating that time to deliver better outcomes.
Ready to unify your compliance strategy? Discover how Smarsh’s AI-powered platform brings voice, text, and over 100 channels together to simplify compliance, cut costs, and future-proof your communications.
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