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From telephone calls to emails, text & instant messages, collaboration and conferencing tools, and social media – the volume of communications that companies nowadays create on a daily basis is overwhelming.
Most of these media allow your employees to search through messages and find the information they need to get their job done.
But, preserving these messages in safe, tamper-proof archives to ensure compliance with relevant regulations is quite challenging.
Chances are your employees can’t keep up with archiving their daily communications besides completing their regular tasks.
This article will discuss why archiving can be a burden to your employees and how using technology to automate archiving process can help your business.
The Archiving Burden Explained
When your employees are responsible for archiving communications, deciding what to do with the enormous volume of data they encounter daily can be overwhelming.
To archive communications, your employees must know the following:
- what to archive,
- what format to use,
- how to classify data,
- where to store it,
- how to secure the data they archive.
But the story doesn’t end there. Your employees must also know how to make data retrieval possible in the event of litigation, open records requests, or internal investigations.
Furthermore, they must be particularly well informed about data retention – how long to keep the archived data and when and why to delete it.
Not a single one of the issues we’ve mentioned is self-explanatory. Now, even if your policies could keep up with constantly evolving data retention requirements, having your staff manually, archive communications could face quite a few challenges.
Below are just a few of the crucial ones:
- Employees don’t have enough time to dedicate to archiving communications.
- They may lack the knowledge and training to classify and manage data efficiently.
- Employees have trouble understanding retention policies.
- The volume of data keeps increasing as the number of data sources employees access daily grows exponentially.
- Employees can’t keep track of all the changes in data retention requirements.
- They may not consider archiving communications as one of their typical job responsibilities.
- Some employees believe they own their data and don’t have a habit of archiving it.
- Data security risks keep increasing.
So, if you expect your employees to archive communications, you must be aware that they may lack the incentive, time, and knowledge, to complete this task.
The odds are that archiving won’t be done adequately, at least not in the way that would keep your company safe and under regulations.
This may leave you vulnerable to various security risks and litigation, as well as harm your reputation.
By automating archiving, you will be able to archive every email, sms, Slack, or social media message in one central location for easy retrieval.
Below, we will explain in more detail how automation can help your company and unburden your employees.
1. Stop Your Employees from Wasting Time On Menial Tasks
Archiving communications can be very time-consuming for your employees. As mentioned above, employees must identify which communication records to store, where, and when and then archive each record manually.
Being so time-consuming, employees may sometimes postpone this task and then forget about it altogether.
Automated data archiving saves the time your employees would otherwise waste on archiving records manually. Once your archiving software is set up, your employees don’t need to worry about archiving communications daily. The software will do the work instead of them automatically, following a predefined schedule.
This way, the archiving solution will free up their working hours to focus on more profitable tasks.
2. Cover All Communication Channels
The volume of data we generate is stunning and growing fast. So is the volume of data your employees now have access to.
Employees today use multiple diverse communication channels for business purposes. As a result, many messages they exchange with their colleagues, clients, or the public need to be archived to remain compliant.
However, if employees must deal with all these interactions manually, they can easily omit to archive some vital records.
By automating communications archiving, you can cover all the bases and preserve communication data from all platforms your company uses.
3. Ensure Compliance
Legal requirements for archiving and retention policies are complex and top of that, constantly changing. As a result, keeping up with them can be highly burdensome.
Automation can help you simplify this process and always stay compliant. For example, archiving solutions can create and implement custom retention policies automatically.
This way, your records are only archived for the retention period and automatically deleted once it expires.
4. Reduce Human Error
Most employees don’t know how to archive and manage data correctly. As a result, they may save documents improperly, at the wrong location, or in the wrong format. Or, as we’ve already mentioned, they may not archive a record at all.
However, their lack of knowledge or skills doesn’t exclude your company from legal responsibilities or protect you from non-compliance.
To stay safe and under relevant regulations, businesses should ditch manual, error-prone archiving and switch to an automated archiving solution.
Such a solution will minimize the risk of human errors, ensuring all communications are stored in one place following a predefined set of rules.
To Sum Up
As communication data volume grows, companies must ensure compliance by properly archiving communication records.
Automation can help businesses achieve this goal by simplifying communication archiving processes, reducing the odds of errors, and saving their employees valuable time.
You may also like: Top Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Archive Text Messages – Infographic
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