You understand the importance of internal communications, you said? But if you are choosing convenience at the cost of security, it won’t be easy for you after all. If your employees are using WhatsApp for business for their interactions at the workplace, don’t expect secure employee communication.
The rise of WhatsApp has been as heady as envious, with 1.5 billion users and 60 billion messages sent per day. Being convenient, cheap, and fast, using WhatsApp for business has become a norm world over.
But don’t we all know the old adage: don’t mix business and pleasure. WhatsApp works if you are sending out details of a beach holiday next week to your friends in a group. But not so much if you are sharing confidential financial information or sensitive business reports of your organization on the platform. Here’s a simple question: Why would you use a consumer app to perform enterprise functions? Do you use Venmo to close business deals? Or a Slack or Yammer to chat up with your beer buddies? The reality is, apps are built according to their user environments. Enterprise communication apps are purpose-built to solve business problems and consumer communication apps are built for personal and social interaction. You can’t substitute one for the other, and it’s time to look for an alternative to WhatsApp for your business communications.
Secure employee communication is one of the key focus areas of any enterprise. WhatsApp defeats the purpose on the following counts:
Lack of confidentiality: Data leakage is a key worry with WhatsApp. In a recent study, 70% employees admitted they practise risky online behaviour like sharing passwords, copying files onto a personal device, etc. In such a situation, how do you ensure confidential business information stays within the network if you are using WhatsApp?
Lack of ownership: With WhatsApp, you can’t have complete ownership of all communication data. The vendor collects “limited data” and it is still fuzzy how they use it. So you can’t ensure that all messages and files shared are completely secure and confidential. They have chances of falling prey to a third party.
Limited compliance: In some industries (like healthcare with its strict HIPAA guidelines), using WhatsApp is a veritable disaster.
Lack of administration: With an enterprise-grade communication app, the IT team has full control over its administration. But with WhatsApp, you have to surrender the rights to someone else. For example, you can’t have rights to add someone to or remove someone from a group if it wasn’t created by you in the first place. Similarly, if an employee changes his number, the new owner of the old number can very easily have access to all confidential messages shared in the group. Therefore, a WhatsApp business alternative is a must have for business communications, especially with frontline workers.
Along with a unsecure communication experience, WhatsApp is also not highly focused on, and highly relevant to, workplace communication.
It is uninsightful: You can’t use WhatsApp to track, analyze, and derive insights from messages that might be useful to find weak links in, and improve your, communication strategy.
It is limiting: If you are a large organization, you would want to have groups with a large number of employees. But WhatsApp groups allow you to add up to 100 members only. Also, WhatsApp does not allow you to share files of size exceeding 16MB.
It is distracting: Your employees can use a particular WhatsApp group for both personal and official messaging. This is a prime example of cluttered, unfocused, and inefficient communication in a workplace. Guess that alternative to WhatsApp seems appealing after all.
With such security and convenience lapses, many businesses are already banning the use of WhatsApp for business use. The idea is to select an enterprise-grade employee communication app that gives you the comfort and ease of a consumer app but has the vital bells and whistles in place for secure and strongly relevant employee communication — a highly potent mix for enterprises. WhatsApp does have a business app but that hasn’t found many takers yet.
Groupe.io is the best WhatsApp alternative tool that delivers as an easy, secure, and highly focused enterprise-grade employee communication app.
With Groupe.io,
Be secure: All official and sensitive communication like messages and files stay secure within the network, thanks to its robust security.
Establish mission control: Establish ownership of all communication and ensure they are not leaked. Protect company data with data wipes and remote revocation. Plus, be in complete control of the groups and edit, add, delete members as and when necessary.
Experience convenience: Add as many employees in a group, share heavy files on the network, stay focused with only official communication on the platform, and easily monitor and measure metrics through Groupe.io’s highly intuitive dashboard.
And do a whole lot more: Groupe.io lets you integrate other work apps like Salesforce, Zoho, SAP, etc. into it. This way, employees can have access to all information on a single app. Also, you can leverage the product’s AI-powered bots that automates tasks like leave approvals. Through Groupe.io, you can ramp up employee engagement through polls, surveys, crowdsourcing ideas, making it an apt WhatsApp alternative for business.
There’s no competition really. Enterprises need to wake up to the reality of pitfalls while using consumer-grade apps like WhatsApp for official purposes. And embrace the natural choice of an enterprise-level secure, convenient, and focused WhatsApp alternative app. Groupe.io goes way beyond WhatsApp offerings and firmly establishes itself as a solid employee communication enterprise app that delivers.
Schedule a personalized demo to find out how you can switch to the best WhatsApp Alternative in no time. Any questions? Drop us a mail at [email protected], and we'll be on it right away!