Is WhatsApp the new way to manage client & internal communications?

By Tom Booth
MD, Founder, Head of Agency or what ever you want to call him

You might think ‘here’s another agency with a wacky idea.’ If you think that, then please keep an open mind and continue to read this post.

As a digital agency, we’re constantly looking for the next platform or innovative way to engage our clients with consumers. Over the past 12 months WhatsApp has grown at an incredible rate – intact it’s the fasted growing social media platform in the last year with 1 billion users worldwide.

The best thing to date – it’s promotion free, with no strange algorithms to play around with. In other words, it’s FREE, simple and mobile (and even desktop).

We first introduced WhatApp as a way of cutting down our internal emails throughout the company. Cutting the crap basically. As the MD, Founder, Head of Agency or what ever you want call me, I’m a huge fan of keeping everyone in the loop within the business.

Our creatives now snap an idea or design to gain quick feedback as they are working on the project, not waiting for whatever Adobe software they are using at the time to save, download and send. Our AD can now get in contact with me almost instantly as I’m on the train to London, or literally just out of a meeting. I personally think even our cleaner should know what we are up to on a day-to-day basis.

Basically, email is FAST but being FASTER than that is better for both client and agency. This is why have now incorporated WhatsApp communication with our clients. Yes, CLIENTS do actually WhatsApp us on a day-to-day basis.

Feedback to date is that they are now more happy than ever! The great thing is that we also collaborate with many departments of a clients team and the easiest thing in the world for us to do is create a group through WhatsApp for relevance.

Most importantly WhatsApp is social media at the end of the day. At Forever we encourage our staff to show their true personality, whether that’s being a cheeky-chappy or an articulate communicator, we’re a people business. Our clients must like and understand our people and no doubt WhatsApp is a great way to show emotion and personality through laid-back forms of written communication, emoji’s included.

Other Messenger Options for Business

We have tried many different instant messenger’s in the past. SLACK is a great option and has more business-related features than WhatsApp, however trying to convince clients into shifting into something new is a challenge and WhatsApp is something that almost every client is personally familiar with.

I do however have many growing concerns for WhatsApp as it’s owned by Facebook. They will either do 2 things, extract data through conversation and feed it to Facebook (which I hope they do) or introduce advertising or sponsored stories entering our conversations, which in my opinion would be the death of it. Either way, WhatsApp is here to make money for Facebook, so in the meantime, let’s enjoy it and utilise this free amazing communication tool with our people, clients and brands.