3 Reasons Why Leading Organisations Choose Verint for Microsoft Teams Compliance Excellence

Verint Team May 11, 2021

More than a year into the pandemic crisis, it’s now evident that Microsoft Teams has come to symbolise the post-Covid workspace.

As the need for remote working rapidly increased, businesses embraced modern collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, in a bid to stay connected, increase productivity and boost teamwork across globally dispersed and increasingly digital workspaces. However, especially in regulated industries, there has also been a growing realisation that existing compliance technology solutions may not meet minimum compliance standards for recording and monitoring the variety of communication features offered by these platforms.

Verint was one of the first technology vendors to work with Microsoft, customers and partners to bring a Microsoft Teams compliance recording solution to the market.

From the outset, Verint decided to pursue a different path from the rest of the industry, by looking beyond simply recording interactions, and designing a solution that addresses the specific compliance and risk management use cases our customers have to grapple with when deploying Microsoft Teams in their environment.

Already, Verint is supporting over 60 regulated companies globally with an added layer of compliance risk mitigation on top of their Microsoft Teams implementation. These include asset managers, investment banks, wealth managers, securities trading organisations, insurance companies and businesses from other regulated verticals across geographies.

Verint’s solution has been engineered with the active involvement of our customers, in a collaborative and consultative approach, designed to make sure it addresses the real-life, compliance pain points encountered when using Teams. It features strong integration with Microsoft Azure, purpose-built discovery, replay and display of captured communication records and metadata, together with reliable security mechanisms and data governance workflows. The solution supports all channels and interaction scenarios in the Teams calling, meetings and collaboration streams—such as voice, video conferencing, screen sharing, peer-to-peer, group and channel-based instant messaging, attachments and more.

So why do regulated organisations opt for the Verint solution to help them build compliance excellence for Teams collaboration?

  1. Verint is certified for Microsoft Teams compliance recording

First and foremost, Verint provides an officially certified, policy-based recording solution for Microsoft Teams. This certification provides users with assurance that Verint’s solution has been tested and verified, to ensure it provides the quality, compatibility, security and reliability they expect from Microsoft solutions.

Verint customers can be confident that it integrates seamlessly and reliably with Teams across various deployment models, communication scenarios with high calling and meeting volumes.

As an early member of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Verint collaborated with Microsoft and other leading organisations around the world to help them roll out Teams recording for compliance purposes. As it was highlighted at this year’s Microsoft Ignite virtual conference, Microsoft’s verification of the integration with Teams—through rigorous functional, security and interoperability testing—is testament to Verint’s commitment to helping Teams users successfully navigate the regulatory landscape.

This important milestone is recognition of more than two years of co-engineering and development effort that has resulted in one of the most comprehensive Teams compliance solutions on the market.

All of which is underpinned by a close co-selling partnership with Microsoft, and entries in Microsoft’s official Appsource Listing and Azure Marketplace.

  1. Teams chat compliance just got a lot easier

Instant messaging in Teams is popular and easy-to-use. No wonder that knowledge workers across frontline and back office operations frequently choose this direct and casual approach to real-time communications. It is dangerous, however, to ignore the risks of leaving IM sessions and persistent, thread-based chat flows uncaptured and unmonitored.

To address these risks, Verint has designed and built an industry-first integration for instant messaging compliance that will help manage compliance risk for users collaborating via peer-to-peer, group or channel-based chat streams.

Building coverage for channel-based chat streams required a fundamental change of mindset on how to build recording capabilities able to meet strict compliance demands. It requires the solution to not only capture all instant messages (IMs) by regulated users, but also to record and make available all threads, attachments, mentions, social reactions, edits and other rich content shared and exchanged in those chat conversations.

This in turn required a completely new way of preserving instant messaging, where the traditional sense of chat sessions, CDR and duration simply does not apply. Now we are dealing with continuous, dynamic chat streams that need to be reliably captured for evidencing, recordkeeping, analysis and communication monitoring purposes.

To address this expanded requirement, Verint have designed a unified IM compliance capture service and an advanced data model for chat messages that is able to handle ongoing chat sessions as threads without unnecessary duplications. There is also a new, streamlined IM viewer where persistent chat, recorded from Teams, is displayed in easily searchable and exportable rich format, complemented with inline file attachments and other mentions and reactions. Uniquely, this provides the full context of what was typed, shared, shown and exchanged across all parties to the interaction.

Businesses can now capture IMs for more than 100,000 regulated users, and bring those communications and other channels into a unified repository for timeline review and free text search. And compliance officers and analysts can instantly search for keywords and key phrases, automatically label interactions, assign chat records to cases and export the data into external systems. All without the restriction of proprietary formats and the other ways historical data is often held hostage in legacy solutions.

  1. Purpose-built for advanced compliance use cases

Now, more than ever, compliance teams in many different industries must stand ready to monitor and assure compliance with multiple regulations, from multiple jurisdictions, and often with complex and onerous requirements. Meeting these demands is no small task, and it has been complicated further by an explosion in the use of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams.

Verint’s compliance recording solutions are built to help address these requirements and are trusted by more than 300 users of Microsoft Unified Communications, in over 40 countries.

For these organisations, Verint provides unprecedented flexibility and scalability that enables streamlined teamwork and enhanced collaboration, while assuring adherence to relevant regulatory record-keeping, monitoring and data governance requirements. Users are able to exploit purpose-built, sophisticated functionality for data retention, data discovery, data analysis, transcription, case management, legal hold and data governance—with an extra layer of security and data protection to help ensure their data is always safe and secure.

Integrated, resilient compliance recording is provided for Microsoft Teams voice calling, screen sharing, video conferencing, chat and other modes of collaboration, as well as other tools and channels in multi-platform communications environments. All of which is augmented by deep integration with the Microsoft Azure Cloud ecosystem.

Compliance for Microsoft Teams is about more than the ability to reliably record Teams interactions. With a wealth of different ways to swap comments and content, it is clear that it should also cover persistent, thread-based chat flows as well as in-the-moment conversations across voice, video, file share and screen share.

Verint’s unrivalled experience and innovation in providing the very best compliance tools for unified communications is the reason why leading organisations are increasingly turning to Verint to help them achieve Microsoft Teams compliance excellence.