Your people are already having these conversations. None of them are on the record.
Work messages live in your care homes and staff rooms, your frontline teams, your fundraising chats, your trustee and council boards. Personal phones, group chats, the back-channel everyone actually uses. Your data protection lead knows. Whoever minds your IT has tried to stop it. The conversations happen anyway – just outside everything you bought to keep the organisation safe.
Then one morning it surfaces. A solicitor's letter asks for "all messages about my mother". A safeguarding review needs a chat that sits on the personal phone of someone who left in March. An inspector asks how handover decisions are recorded, and the only honest answer is "on people's own phones".
You can spend another year fighting the culture. Or you can keep a record of the messaging your people will not give up – and give the board a record that is clean from the very first message.
Three doors everyone tries. None of them hold.
Write the policy. Send the memo.
The chats don't stop; they go quiet. Risk you could at least see becomes risk you can't, and the next incident arrives with "and they knew" attached to it.
Roll out the approved app.
Teams, Slack, a "secure messenger". People use it for a fortnight, the night shift never moves, the families never join. Now you run two places: one official and empty, one real and invisible. The lesson isn't that any one app is wrong – it's that forcing a new download never sticks. You need the right one for each group: a channel of your own for the board, work tools for staff, and a channel reached by a plain text for the families who'll never download anything new.
Hope the letter never comes.
The cheapest option, right up until the morning it isn't. This strategy ends with a Subject Access Request, a tribunal order or an inspection finding – and it picks the date, not you.
Don't fight the apps. Keep the record.
One record, from wherever your people talk. Use a channel of your own for the board, so their record is clean from the first message – no other app in the middle, no separate number per group. Bring staff and inter-agency work onto Microsoft Teams – the system you already pay for. And for the families and frontline who'll never move, a channel that opens from a plain text, verified by SMS, with nothing to install. Keep every word, tell people it is on the record, and be ready to answer anything – wherever the conversation actually happens. Same habits, now on the record.
Four steps. Then it just runs.
Set up a channel that is on the record
Pick what fits each group. A channel of your own for the board – the record is made in our system, with no number to register and nothing to install. Microsoft Teams for staff and inter-agency work. And for the families and frontline, a published number and a channel verified by text, so they message like any other contact – no app to install.
Bring your people across
We set up each channel you've chosen and give you the words to send to staff and families. You manage who is in from one page: add someone in a click, remove them the moment they leave. Staff and inter-agency work answer from Microsoft Teams; families text a published number, verify by SMS, and land straight in the channel.
Every message kept
Each message is saved the moment it is sent, into your own Microsoft 365 – kept, held and easy to search under the same rules as your email, using the Microsoft controls your IT lead already runs. Everyone added to a channel is told it is on the record and can object or leave at any time – never in secret.
Search, hold, answer
Subject Access Requests, safeguarding evidence, keeping records and holding them for a court – the records found in hours, not weeks, from every channel, in a permanent record kept in your own Microsoft 365. We run the channel and hold a working copy to operate it; the system of record you answer from is yours, never ours.
Keep a record from every channel you give your people. Every word on the record.
Everyone in ComplyChat is either staff or a guest. Staff see each other in the people list and can call each other. Guests – families, residents, clients, volunteers – never see that list, only the channels you put them in, and whether they can make voice or video calls is set on each channel.
The board's record, clean from the start.
Trustees and governors work in a channel of your own – the record is made in our system and lands in your own Microsoft 365. No other messaging app in the middle, no separate number per group, no risk of being thrown off someone else's platform. The cleanest setup we offer: nothing from Meta touches it.
Staff and inter-agency, in your own Microsoft 365.
Safeguarding between staff and across agencies, in a named Microsoft Teams channel – the record made in your own Microsoft 365. One person messages and it reaches your staff in Teams. One-to-one messages and whole-group replies both work from Teams.
The experience people already know – now on the record.
One published number takes a plain text from anyone – prospects, families, the frontline. They verify by SMS in seconds and land straight in a channel built around the messaging habits people already have, with nothing to install and no account with anyone else. Every word is kept in your own Microsoft 365.
Built for the people who have to answer for it.
The right place for each group
A channel of your own for the board, Microsoft Teams for staff and inter-agency work, and – for families and the frontline – a published number and a channel verified by text, in your organisation's name, not a volunteer's personal phone. Each one belongs to your organisation, so it lasts through staff coming and going, new phones and awkward exits.
Joiners in, leavers out, instantly
Add and remove people from one easy page. When someone leaves, they're off every channel before they reach the car park. No more "who still has access to that chat".
Every message, in your own Microsoft 365
Texts, photos, voice notes, recorded calls and documents – kept from every channel you run, your published numbers and Microsoft Teams alike – into your own Microsoft 365, not ours. Not a store you rent space in from a supplier: the record sits in the Microsoft 365 you already own, under your own rules for keeping, holding and searching, from day one. If you ever leave, there is nothing to hand back – the records were always yours.
Your office on Teams. Families through a plain text.
Office staff and managers work from a named conversation inside Microsoft Teams – the record made in your own Microsoft 365, every word kept. Relatives never download anything new: they text your published number, verify by SMS, and land in the channel – and the board has a channel of its own too.
Groups on the record, in the place that fits
A Microsoft Teams channel carries a whole group, not just one line: a committee of six or a whole home, on the record from day one. And where the board wants a place of its own, a ComplyChat channel carries the whole group with no separate number at all.
Even the gaps leave a record
If a text can't reach someone, or a message can't be delivered for any reason, the attempt itself is recorded: who didn't receive it, when, and why. Your evidence trail covers what didn't arrive as well as what did.
The messaging side of a Subject Access Request, found in an afternoon
Start a request and search the record in your own Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Purview. Your own team blacks out what it must, puts it together and sends it within the month the law allows – ours on the call beside you if you want company. Built around ICO guidance, for the person whose name goes on the reply.
Records that survive deletion
Messages are saved the instant they are sent – deleting a message in the app cannot pull it back out of the record – and a Microsoft 365 legal hold keeps them through any attempt to wipe them. An evidence trail your trustees can rely on.
Per-organisation, never pooled
Your permanent record of truth – the SAR-answerable, eDiscovery archive – lives in your own Microsoft 365, behind your own locks. Most products like this pool every client's permanent records in one vendor-owned vault; we never do. We run the channel and hold a working copy to operate it, which you can switch to a 90-day purge or move into your own Azure on a dedicated deployment. A break-in at our end would expose recent operational conversation data, never a permanent, pooled archive of every client – because your authoritative record is in your own tenant, not on our servers.
Recorded voice and video calls, transcript included
Calls happen in the same channel, recorded end to end, with clear on-screen labelling so everyone on the call can see that audio and video are being recorded. The recording and its transcript file into your own Microsoft 365 – SharePoint holds them, and the Teams conversation carries the card that links to them – so a call is as answerable as a message.
A proper people directory
Every contact has a person page – job title, team, profile photo – and the same face and name follow them consistently across chat, calls and read receipts. When it matters who said it, who saw it and who was on the call, the record shows a person, not a bare number.
Busy lines stay readable
Each channel's chat list folds every contact's messages into their own tidy thread, so a duty line with forty families reads as forty conversations, not one scrolling wall. Staff answer the right person first time, and the record keeps each conversation whole.
A link, a QR poster, a tap
Every line can be shared as a link, printed as a QR poster for reception, or issued as an NFC tap-tag for a noticeboard or lanyard. One scan or tap, a quick SMS code, and someone is in the channel – verified, told it's on the record, and free to leave at any time. No app store in sight.
Feels like the chat app they already use
Reactions, replies, voice notes, photos and documents, polls and events, location sharing, read ticks, presence – it feels like the messaging app your people already use, not a compliance form. It installs to the home screen straight from the browser, and native Android and iOS apps are on the way. Your staff can live in it too, or answer from Microsoft Teams if that's where they work – the record lands in your own Microsoft 365 either way.
Know where you stand before someone asks.
Thirty minutes with our team. Bring your hardest case – the group nobody admits to, the leaver with two years of messages. In the first minute or two you'll be messaging in a real channel from your own phone; before we finish, a magic link signs you into your own client portal, where you can see your own record. Then a straight answer on whether we are right for you. Even if that answer is no.
The briefing: one page on the risks in your work messaging, written for boards. No follow-up unless you ask for one.