Every large organisation with customer interactions, from call centres to front desks, from chatbots to video support, grapples with the same tangle of massive volumes of conversation data scattered across systems, opaque customer sentiment, shifting regulatory demands, and rising expectations for personalised experience.
These challenges aren’t academic. Compliance laws (think GDPR, CCPA), data privacy norms, and customers’ expectations for seamless omnichannel support pressure risk teams and operations. Meanwhile, customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or First Contact Resolution only tell part of the story and often rely on sampling, surveys, or after-the‐fact analysis.
So, how can businesses capture every touch, make sense of it, protect it, act on it in near real time, and avoid fines or loss of trust? Enter VCon, possibly the buzziest breakthrough at CASA25, this year’s CPaaS Acceleration Summit Amsterdam, and one that promises to address many of these pain points in one fell swoop.
What Exactly Are VCons? Defining the Standard
VCon (Virtual Conversation) is a new open standard, or more precisely, a proposed file format and protocol under discussion at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), for capturing, storing, exchanging, and analysing conversational data in a unified, auditable, privacy-aware way.
Thomas Howe, CTO of VConic, described it to UC Today as:
…Essentially a file format, like a JPEG or spreadsheet, but instead of storing an image or data table, it stores a conversation.”
It contains four parts: participants, recordings, analyses, and attachments.
Participants are those involved in the conversation, while recordings are the raw media, comprising voice, video, messaging, email, etc, with privacy/GDPR protections. Analyses are derived outputs, such as transcripts, sentiment, intent, or predictions (such as likelihood to recommend), with full traceability of how the analysis was done. Lastly, attachments (metadata and provenance) comprise timestamps, channels, and whether a conversation is authentic or a deepfake, etc.
VCon is intended to be interoperable across platforms. A conversation captured in one CPaaS, UCaaS, messaging or video channel should generate a VCon that other tools can read, process, and move between systems. It’s similarly designed with data responsibility in mind to enforce individuals’ rights (to correction, deletion, or audit).
How VCons Work Mechanically & Why They Fix Your Real-World Problems
Mechanically, VCons capture all relevant data from a conversation and package it into a standardised file format. This includes the conversation’s media, metadata, compliance information, and any AI-generated analyses. The structured nature of VCons allows for easy storage, retrieval, and analysis, facilitating a more streamlined approach to managing conversational data.
The impact of VCons is particularly evident in several key areas, including enhanced compliance and data governance. By encapsulating all relevant compliance information within the VCon file, organisations can more easily manage data retention, deletion, and access requests, ensuring adherence to regulations like GDPR.
Another is improved customer experience. With all conversational data stored in a standardised format, organisations can gain deeper insights into customer interactions, enabling more personalised and responsive service. Howe highlighted:
With VCons, transcription accuracy and AI speed allow every conversation to be analysed. This enables coaching at scale—agents receive personalised, actionable feedback across all their calls. We’ve seen this applied widely in voice-heavy industries to boost customer service performance.”
Operational efficiency is also elevated, as the standardised nature of VCons reduces the complexity of integrating conversational data across different systems, leading to more streamlined operations and reduced costs.
Lastly, VCons empowers AI and analytics. VCons provide a rich dataset that can be leveraged for AI training and analytics, leading to more accurate models and better decision-making.
VCons’ Impact Across Industries
The versatility of VCons extends across various industries, each benefiting uniquely from this standardised approach to conversational data, such as in healthcare. Patient confidentiality naturally demands strong compliance. VCon could embed consent status, retention rules, and consent revocation, and it could help audit for privacy and security. Also, it could assist in tele-consultation summarisation, extracting clinical insights from conversations (symptoms, follow-up), or measuring patient satisfaction without asking for surveys.
Companies like STROLID have utilised VCons to capture and analyse customer interactions in the automotive sector. This approach has led to improved customer satisfaction by identifying and addressing issues more effectively. As Howe shared:
If a customer is angry because they drove half an hour to see a car that wasn’t actually in stock, the communication reveals a website inventory issue. Without VCon, that link between customer frustration and operational data would be lost.”
In Financial Services, regulatory bodies demand proof of disclosures, transactions, and audit logs. VCon could verify that agents made required verbal disclosures, track sensitive topics (fraud, KYC), flag compliance violations, and retain conversation media for required durations. It could also help detect tone or commands indicating dissatisfaction or legal risk.
The Future of Conversational Intelligence and the Role of VCons
The arrival of VCons is pitched to reshape how businesses treat conversational data. For years, customer interactions have been scattered across voice calls, chat threads, video meetings and emails, each siloed within its own platform. That fragmentation has left businesses struggling to piece together a full picture of the customer journey, while simultaneously wrestling with compliance regimes such as GDPR that demand precise control over personal data.
By design, VCons tackle this problem head-on. Each file acts as a self-contained container for a conversation, bundling the raw media with metadata, timestamps, participants, compliance records and even AI-generated insights. Standardisation means those files can easily move across systems, whether into analytics tools, CRM platforms, or compliance archives. In essence, VCons transform conversations from ephemeral exchanges into structured, portable data assets.
“Ground-breaking” is a clichéd buzzword in enterprise tech, but VCons could prove a legitimately ground-breaking innovation. Compliance teams gain clarity in retention and deletion policies. As Howe
Customer service leaders access richer insights into sentiment and pain points. AI systems receive cleaner, more consistent training data. Even operational bottlenecks, such as mismatched inventory or misrouted calls, can be exposed more directly.
Instead of being lost in a sea of disconnected interactions, conversations become actionable information, creating new opportunities for efficiency, personalisation and growth.
