Business communication is essential for effective collaboration and ultimately, success. Up until relatively recent decades, there was no real choice when it came to a company’s communication channels. Phone, fax and email and even snail mail were the norms and that was the end of the story. But today, Digital Transformation and innovation has brought us a plethora of choices, especially in the area of instant messaging apps.
But what happens if you choose the wrong instant messaging app for office use? And what if indecision leaves you in a position where you don’t make any official choice at all? Well, the impact on your company’s communications can be significant — significantly negative, that is.
The Role of Instant Messaging Mobile Apps in Business Communications
Instant messaging and SMS texting mobile apps and desktop platforms allow for extremely efficient and user-friendly modes of communication. In fact, the latest instant messaging stats paint a really clear picture of this communication channel’s dynamics. Consider these email and instant messaging statistics.
- 23 billion instant messages are sent worldwide each day from 3 billion people – that’s approximately 40% of the world’s population!
- 33% of American adults prefer text messaging over all other forms of communication.
- Text is the most-used form of communication for American adults under age 50.
- The average response time for emails is 90 minutes. The average response time for text messages is 90 seconds.
- The average open rate for emails is 20%. The average open rate for texts is 98%.
- A survey of employees found 62% cited email as their primary source of on-the-job distractions.
These email and instant messaging stats make it clear: IM for office use is clearly the way to go, but that means you need to choose an official platform for your business — one that has a great UI/UX and allows for regulatory compliance, data ownership and control, admin and moderation capabilities, and data export and auditing tools, amongst others.
What Happens if You Don’t Choose the Correct Instant Messaging App for Your Business?
Failing to choose the right instant messaging app for your business communication needs can bring some major and very negative consequences.
But first we must address the question of what happens if indecision leaves you paralyzed and you don’t choose any official IM or texting platform at all. This is perhaps the worst of all choices because if you don’t select an instant messaging app for business communications, your employees will make the decision for you. And you may not like what they choose. They’re going to choose third-party apps — yes, multiple apps in most cases — that are the most user-friendly, with no attention to features such as security, data export and data retention capabilities, or regulatory compliance. The platforms they choose are likely to be the apps that they’re already using to communicate with friends and family, which adds another complication since there’s the possibility of accidentally intermingling replies to business and personal messages.
What’s more, it’s very difficult to shift users onto a new messaging platform once they’ve become well-established on an app. Failing to deploy an official business messaging platform can have some challenging consequences to say the least. In fact, it’s fair to say that in most cases, it’s better to choose a less-than-perfect messaging app for business versus allowing your employees to use a variety of disparate, third-party instant messaging and texting platforms.
What Happens if You Don’t Choose the Correct Instant Messaging App for Your Business?
If you fail to choose the right instant messaging app for your business communication needs, you could find yourself in a bad position, with poor user adoption, collaboration challenges and regulatory compliance issues which can lead to significant fines and penalties. Let’s take a look at how some of these challenges can arise.
• Poor User Adoption – User adoption is always a challenge because humans are naturally reluctant to change, especially when they are comfortable with their current communication channel(s). The best instant messaging apps for business communications are user-friendly with an intuitive user interface (UI) that delivers a positive user experience (UX). This is critical for mobile app user adoption because users will be hesitant to keep using an app that’s difficult to navigate and engage — especially if they have another option that they can revert back to, such as the platform that they were using previously. Training is also important because it provides users with an opportunity to learn how to use the new messaging platform with maximum efficiency.
• Collaboration Challenges – If you don’t choose the correct instant messaging app for business communications, you’re almost certain to encounter collaboration challenges. This is true whether it’s collaboration with colleagues or clients. A small number of business messaging platforms now include external messaging — like SayHey Messenger® — which allows for messaging with other app users and external messaging with SMS texting. This means that users can use the app to securely send SMS texts to clients, customers and other individuals who don’t have the app installed. This allows for seamless collaboration from a single business messaging platform.
• Regulatory Compliance Challenges – Regulatory compliance is a major consideration for many companies in the realm of healthcare, finance, investing and insurance, among others. The consequences of noncompliance can be devastating, with fines totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. Take the example of nearly a dozen major banks that were recently hit with almost $2 billion dollars in fines after they allowed employees to use non-compliant messaging apps to communicate with clients. The consumer-grade messaging apps such as WhatsApp and iMessage resulted in record keeping violations, prompting the SEC and CTFC to issue $1.8 billion in fines to eleven banks. It all came down to an inability to export and retain messaging data in a compliant manner.
Consumer-grade messaging apps and even most enterprise instant messaging platforms lack audit capabilities, real-time export tools, control over data retention and even true and complete data control and ownership. To maintain regulatory compliance, you need to choose the correct instant messaging app for business communication, with these tools and others such as:
- Machine learning-powered keyword monitoring tools;
- Admin and moderation capabilities;
- Auditing tools;
- Real-time data export tools;
- Data sovereignty and data governance tools; and
- Full data ownership with secure cloud storage.
These tools and capabilities, when combined with comprehensive user training, will lead to strong user adoption rates, and the streamlined collaboration and communication capabilities that are essential for success. SayHey Messenger® has all of these features and more, making it a great SMS texting and instant messaging app choice for companies in highly-regulated industries and beyond.
Streamlining Communications With a Business Messaging App
SayHey Messenger® is a unique and regulatory-compliant business instant messaging platform that solves many of the challenges that companies face when it comes to communication. The team at 7T developed SayHey Messenger® as a method for patching the holes in your company’s messaging situation.
The SayHey Messenger® app features:
- Data sovereignty for control and ownership of all messaging data;
- Fully compliant instant messaging for regulated businesses;
- Seamlessly integrates into existing company software platforms;
- Admin portal for moderation, auditing, and inclusivity;
- SayHey Spaces for company-wide broadcasts and team collaborations;
- Engaging, intuitive user interface for incredible adoption rates;
- Send compliant SMS messages to external users with full data retention; and
- Custom UI with your logo, colors and branding elements for a style that’s all yours.
SayHey Messenger® offers two deployments: a SayHey Messenger® Business deployment with a mobile app platform (for iOS and Android) and web app portal. There’s also SayHey Messenger® Enterprise deployments, which entail storing all messaging data in the client’s private cloud environment and the platform is fully integrated within the client’s existing software platforms, including mobile applications. This allows users to access their instant messages without leaving the screen, leading to greater productivity, higher user adoption rates and better efficiency.
Consider using SayHey Messenger® as your business messaging platform. And the best part? We can deploy this business messaging solution in a matter of days. Contact us today to learn more about SayHey Messenger®.
