What actually goes wrong
- A customer's approval sits in one person's phone.
- Photos of completed work are never attached to the job.
- 'Someone should call them back' is addressed to nobody.
- The thread cannot be searched by customer, job or date.
- An employee leaves and takes months of context with them.
Chat is not the enemy
Fast coordination is genuinely valuable, and teams will not stop. The fix is not banning chat — it is making sure anything that matters lands on the record: attached to the customer, attached to the job, with an owner and a next step.
The test
If the person who sent the message left tomorrow, would the business still know what was agreed? If the answer is no, that information was never really recorded.