We were contracted to provide consulting services for a business with staff based in the UK and Overseas. The business had been running successfully for a number of years, however the Directors of the parent company had been alerted to a serious compliance failure and as a result one of the senior managers was suspended, pending an internal investigation, and subsequently resigned, leaving the business shortly afterwards.
The team at the business unit was dysfunctional and required a great deal of man management, as staff had been working through the pandemic at home with little or no direct management nor supervision.
Any interactions with customers were not recorded on any CRM and market information/intelligence was rarely shared between the team members.
The majority of the team had worked together for some time and there was a great deal of loyalty to the, now ex-senior manager and this was evidenced as staff turnover increased significantly following his exit from the business. This was further amplified through the hostile attitude to anyone who shared plans for improvement.
It was combative, messy and it was going to be a very long road to recovery.
One of the key objectives was to start to get greater transparency over the customer activities within the business (i.e. who was doing what) and as all of the interactions appeared to be carried out on the individuals’ personal mobile devices, using their personal WhatsApp, there was a huge risk of the business both being in breach of UK data protection/Privacy laws, but also that the customer contact information was highly likely to be shared with another employer, in the future.
An initial project was carried out to identify a software platform that could offer total visibility of all WhatsApp messaging and which would be capable of facilitating a multi-user, single-number service, where all of the data was secured on the business’s platform and which could be accessed either via Mobile app or PC web, and regardless of whether this data was collected by staff members from the teams, both inside and outside the UK.
A user training plan was introduced and rolled out across the business with multiple department teams being included in the group, thereby supporting the simple transfer of any client documentation received and the assignation of conversations to the right person, all secured and compliant with the data protection and privacy laws.
The WhatsApp for Business service enabled customers to make contact with staff members via WhatsApp at any time of the day as the service was a worldwide 24/7 service and this would enable queries to be dealt with by the working staff members, regardless of their physical location.
As we developed the user experience across the business and with our customers, some automations were introduced to enable key activities to be requested/reported by using keyword shortcuts.
The successful launch of the platform enabled all departments to communicate with our customers seamlessly and with total transparency, and all documentation was saved within the platform history, with a full audit trail, available when required.
It is difficult to quantify the savings to the business but it is clear that this platform helped professionalise the business and was hugely successful in ensuring that everyone within the business could now have full access to the conversations.
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