How do you solve a problem like consumer messaging apps being used for enterprise communications?
In many respects, and for many businesses, there isn’t a problem. Last year, a Vodafone study found that WhatsApp is quietly the most popular enterprise comms platform in operation, especially among SMEs. It has a simple and intuitive user experience, generally functions well and consistently, is easy to implement as most users already have the app, and, perhaps most notably, it’s free. For particularly smaller organisations, like a restaurant or early-stage startup, that’s everything you might need from a business communications platform.
However, there are several major perils that need to be considered if you’re an SME.
“The main problem I see is that (Meta) will eventually try to monetise their investment to acquire it,” Steve Osler, Wildix CEO, told UC Today. “They are not making money, at least not directly.”
“So, being a company that lives on advertisement, we can imagine that sooner or later, they will start showing some advertisements while you are chatting. The risk is that it will be targeted advertising, which will be very effective. While I speak with customers about something, while trying to sell my product, the customer receives an advertisement for a competitive product.”
Osler also outlined the worry of how deeply platforms might assess users’ profiles to inform their targeted ads better. Although WhatsApp can not legally listen to calls or scan message content for targeted advertising as its messages are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), even in the US where privacy laws are looser, it can potentially introduce targeted ads based on metadata, including the user’s contact list, phone number, time and duration of calls, location data and usage patterns.
“So if you tell the customers, ‘Look, from tomorrow, I will show you an advertisement based on what you do on my platform,’ it’s totally legit,” Osler suggested.
There is that famous sentence from the 70s about TV: if the product is free, then you are the product, meaning that they are selling you, your attention, and your capability to buy something from the advertisers. There is always somebody paying; no lunch is free in this world. Absolutely not.”
The Worry of Consumer Messaging Apps Entering the UC Space
WhatsApp is also certainly becoming more enterprise-friendly in its feature set. For example, it most recently trialled video and voice calls for its web app. However, while its productivity and collaboration features are beginning to catch up with the Microsoft Teams and Zoom Workplaces of the world to a limited extent, the absence of more stringent security, privacy and compliance capabilities and protocols is alarming.
“They will add features to satisfy more enterprise users, especially if they see that it’s successful and driving more adoption,” Osler said. “But at the moment, business usage is secondary for them. So, it’s not the reason why somebody subscribes to WhatsApp. It’s the opposite. You have it for personal use, and one day, you decide to use it for the company.”
“Their orientation is to keep attracting users, not businesses. What they want is to drive adoption. They are not putting too much effort into making (WhatsApp Business) a real business application,” Osler asserted.
Osler highlighted the key issue here: beyond the business model, WhatsApp was never built for work. There’s no central control, no real user authentication, and no way to properly manage access.
“They have billions of users, so there is a security problem. I have several groups for my daughter’s school. There are 30 people in one group, and nobody really knows who you are. You have no identity. You see a strange name sometimes. We ask, please, who is this user? And they ask, I am the mom of X or Y. You trust this group, but you don’t know.”
The scandal that was in the US with Signal: If you use WhatsApp for business, that can happen every day. You misspell the name, and you invite the wrong user. Instead of inviting Steve, you invite Steven, and then you don’t see it.”
That’s not even touching on what happens when someone leaves the company. Without diligent management processes, former employees can still be sitting in old chat groups, with access to customer conversations and sensitive data. You might not have a way to revoke access or track what’s been shared.
Osler also pointed out the rise of impersonation scams, outlining a personal experience of friends, family and colleagues receiving requests from an account with his name and picture. Even his mother received a request saying, “I lost my phone. Please send me money.”
The challenge with addressing the spam issue is that if they try to fix it, it will be expensive to verify every user and will slow down adoption: “If you start to verify, the company that is verifying with real documents and so on, adoption will slow down a lot. I don’t think they are really interested in doing that.”
Is a Marriage of Convenience and Mobility, and Enterprise-Grade Security Features, Ever Feasible?
So, what’s the alternative for companies that understandably prioritise convenience and mobility, especially very small businesses or organisations underpinned by frontline workers? According to Osler, the answer is to shift to mobile-centric or mobile-first platforms built for business purposes that still prioritise user experience and intuitiveness.
Wildix, naturally, has embraced that mobile shift with vertical-specific solutions. Its x-bees platform, for instance, is tailored for sales teams, while x-hoppers is built for frontline retail workers.
“x-hoppers is totally mobile-first—like 99 percent,” Osler said. “Most users don’t have a computer; they just have their smartphone or headset. Some people don’t even have smartphones, so they just interact with their headsets.”
“You press a button, and you speak with your team of people. They can have different teams, so they can address logistics, security, and other things. You can interact with AI, ask a question, or contact experts who are in another shop or somebody organised with an internal contact centre. When you ask for information about the product you want to sell, the customer is asking about it. So yes, that one is pure mobile.”
Other solutions, like Microsoft Teams license for Frontline Workers, include mobile-friendly features like push to talk, offering messaging, task and shift tools, and user access control via Azure. Zoom, likewise, has launched a frontline workers-centric solution. Meanwhile, Slack, with its enterprise grid for security purposes, also addresses many demands for an intuitive, easily adoptable mobile platform.
Wildix originally developed x-hoppers and x-bees because it observed that the UC market was entering a mature phase and becoming a commodity: “We have proof that it’s really a commodity market when a company’s products, like WhatsApp, come in because it means that there is no differentiation.”
So, Wildix crafted verticalised solutions to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
“We were looking for something we could do to serve our target customer group better, to do something specific for them,” Osler added. “We chose x-bees because it was a natural evolution of what we were doing. After all, we were focusing on salespeople. x-hoppers can be seen as a vertical of x-bees because it still has salespeople, but in face-to-face environments and shops, it’s a verticalised version of x-bees.”
The beneficiaries of these types of more verticalised or tailored comms solutions, like x-hoppers or Teams and Zoom for Frontline Workers, might be IT leaders or small business owners concerned about WhatsApp’s vulnerabilities but lacking the budget or feature needs for one of the established UC titans.
These distinct offerings might represent the best long-term bridge between easy-to-use mobility and the security and privacy capabilities of traditional UC and UCaaS products, and the best answer to the concerns around WhatsApp’s use in enterprise contexts.
