Read this insightful guide on the silent data crisis.
With almost all conversation going through some form of digitalization these days, you would think that no form of communication goes uncollected.
Yet as the channels of business communication expand beyond company communication architectures like emails and into things like WhatsApp or IM, this is now no longer a log to collect this information.
When considering the contents of those conversations happening on those platforms, having them go unrecorded can be costly.
“When a company’s employee interacts with its customers, a lot of valuable things-quotations, discussions, agreements, decisions, sentiments-are there to be learnt from,” Avi Pardo, Co-founder & CBO at LeapXpert, explained.
Yet in many workplace setups, all of those insights about that customer, that relationship, and even your own staff interaction with them, are not retained nor utilized.
This has led Pardo and LeapXpert to decry that we’re facing a “silent data crisis.”
Far from being something that can be swept under the rug, however, the issue not only means that companies are passively losing out but also stand to lose big in incidents like staff changes.
How Data Slips by Silently
This crisis isn’t rooted in data breaches or security failures, but rather in the rapid shift of business communications to platforms that exist outside corporate governance and visibility.
“What the market is starting to realize is users in organizations and enterprises started using messaging apps much more than emails or voice calls,” Pardo said.
The convenience and immediacy of these platforms have made them indispensable tools in daily operations. However, this convenience comes at a considerable cost that many organizations have yet to fully recognize.
“Why this creates a silent data crisis is because many of these messaging activities are being done on private applications of that staff member, such as WhatsApp, and this is all being done outside the company’s reach to the data, which translates to this evolving data crisis we are starting to see,” Pardo explained.
Such channels like WhatsApp are often not approved as part of a business’ communication tools, but because of their convenience, this often gets ignored by employees.
But aside from any compliance issues this may raise, the problem here is that all business communication data is simply not visible to the company as it’s not connected to the business’ communication architecture. It's not recorded or archived.
Even in case when this data is retained, it often remains siloed in employees’ private messaging accounts. Companies miss critical opportunities to analyze patterns, identify emerging issues, and capitalize on business opportunities.
The scale of this problem is significant.
“If your team is spending 30% of their customer interaction time on messaging apps each week, then 30% of your business activity is effectively happening beyond your visibility,” Pardo said.
Not only is this inaccessible, but for instance, if a high-level salesperson were to leave the company having communicated with clients on their phone.
All of that data, all of those conversations; potential leads, understanding of the client’s intent, would be lost with that person leaving.
Yet the answer isn’t to prohibit staff use of these platforms; that would prove futile and even a hindrance to business being done.
So LeapXpert has created a solution that allows these same systems and workflows to remain, but without leaving the data behind.
LeapXpert’s Innovative Approach to Data IntegrationLeapXpert founders’ unique background in enterprise communication positioned them with the foresight to address this issue long before it became a trend: “We were able to understand this trend years ago,” Pardo explained.
