Instant messaging on WhatsApp has revolutionized the way employees are now interacting while working from home in the wake of the pandemic where remote business collaboration is getting prioritized.

It has taken over emails as the dominant medium of connecting or sharing important documents, providing a quicker way to communicate in real-time.

As per a survey by Report Linker, about 43% of employees use instant messaging at work because of the rising pool of millennials entering the workforce.

However, using WhatsApp for professional purposes can produce several challenges and risks to your business. In the first half of 2019, over 4 billion records got exposed to data breaches.

As per a survey conducted in the US in 2019, 56% of start-ups used informal messaging tools like WhatsApp to communicate.

Confidential company reports that include financial results or links to internal files are hijackable on WhatsApp, as employees might get sloppy when using such casual platforms to connect professionally.

Reasons why WhatsApp is unprofessional for business collaboration

Here are some reasons WhatsApp might not be the optimal solution for team communications and interacting professionally, be it while working from home or at your workplace –

1. Lack of Security

Consider you are a BFSI (Banking, Finance Services, and Insurance) company collaborating on WhatsApp, then you should be on high-alert for data breaches.

Exchanging financial statements, insurance claims, or other credentials on WhatsApp puts you at a high risk of getting hacked because of minimalistic firewall securities for professional interaction.

Anyone can get added to a WhatsApp group without consent. Despite WhatsApp adding security features to prevent this, it is not set by default.

While it is also not clear where exactly does WhatsApp move the data of its users across different countries.

Business communication and collaboration platforms like Zippi enable team members to transfer messages while offering a secure atmosphere to share information freely.

Zippi also provides file sharing restrictions, among other admin-level permissions, to help keep your data secure on a single professional platform.

Learn how India’s BFSI Giant is mastering business collaboration here.

2. Dedicated Workgroups and Cluttering

People use WhatsApp as a casual messaging platform to text their friends or loved ones.

Having work-related chats and workgroups all cluttered with informal chat windows where you are explaining to your buddies how you spent the weekend can get distracting and counter-productive.

Another issue with using WhatsApp for work is that vital work-related messages can get lost among swarms of congratulatory texts, emojis, or GIFs in business groups.

Therefore, your organization needs a team collaboration platform where you can create dedicated workgroups for projects allotted to specific teams and track their progress in real-time.

Collaboration platforms like Zippi promote urgency and accountability to help you emphasize meeting deadlines and working in collaboration with other teams.

Zippi also provides an interactive personal executive assistant called Jinie that nudges you about work priorities and ensures that you meet timelines.

3. Task management 

No company is ever working on a project that requires only one team to function while rendering other staff redundant in the meantime.

With different tasks allotted to various teams, seeking progress reports can become tedious and messy as you might have to keep approaching people with no means to keep records of progress.

However, that is not the case for business collaboration platforms, as they offer you the tools to create dedicated groups based on allotted tasks and projects.

This way, work allotment gets segregated accordingly, and you can conveniently collect timely reports from various teams by receiving a nudge from the AI-powered assistant built into the software.

A popular choice for collaboration software is Zippi, which is the first app in the world to feature inbuilt conversations on different tasks. This empowers you to provide qualitative feedback via conversations.

4. Integrations with other Business Systems 

Business is all about enhancing productivity and efficiency while keeping it as simple as possible. With so many tasks simultaneously at work in an organization, using dozens of business systems for various jobs is inevitable.

This is one of the most significant factors that indicate the requirement of collaboration software that can integrate various other business tools in your enterprise seamlessly and offer a unified analytical report.

WhatsApp is incompetent in integrating multiple business systems as it offers no such features.

Business messaging apps like Zippi let you use built-in tools like Reminders, feature individual and group conversations, generate polls for swift decision making, and share media, learning content, and business documents.

You can also integrate external apps such as Google D   rive, Microsoft Outlook, MS Teams, Zoom, and various other apps using dedicated business collaboration software.

5. Easy Employee Recognitions 

While sending congratulatory messages or GIFs might be an option on WhatsApp, it does not appropriately compliment an employee's legitimate effort for the corporation.

Business collaboration software makes it easy to appreciate and recognize the diligent employees, which helps them stay motivated for future tasks and meet challenges.

Zippi features smart dashboards to provide you with visibility on the productivity of your company. This feature lets you know about the teams that are doing great and the ones that require attention.

6. Seamless File Sharing 

Sharing files on WhatsApp comes with its limitations as you cannot share enormous file sizes, and WhatsApp only offers support to a few formats. With WhatsApp, the shared files can also get buried under swarms of random messages on workgroups.

If you use Google Drive, you must then hop and skip across multiple apps to share just one file.

However, with team collaboration apps, searching for files, sharing them with employees, and managing file permissions can all get executed from within a single app.

All you need to do is link your cloud-storage services to your business messaging software, which then lets you can share files of any size at any time.

7. AI-Enabled collaboration 

AI-enabled collaboration disposes of the most common operational pain points, such as meeting scheduling, technology availability, access to knowledge, and project management.

Projects have strengthened business outcomes with AI working in the background to promote productive meetings and prepare contextually relevant knowledge that accelerates decision making.

AI also unburdens IT and facilities departments from consistent monitoring, maintenance, as-well-as management of meeting spaces and technology.

Zippi offers an AI-powered conversational chatbot called Jinie, which offers –

• Nudge to notify you of upcoming deadlines and task completion reminders
• Drive work prioritization
• Develop a culture of execution
• Offer streamlined integration with CRM, ERP, HR, GSuite, O365, or any other business system.

Final Words

While WhatsApp might seem like a straightforward way out for business collaborations, you must also acknowledge the potential risks it harbours for businesses and BFSI based companies.

Collaboration software like Zippi offers not only a seamless platform to help connect professionally but also added layers of security to safeguard your company's interests and critical documents along with other beneficial features to streamline workflow.