Top 7 business processes you can get done over WhatsApp

The world around us functions over instant messaging. The ever-increasing convenience it offers has led many businesses to use it in a cross-organizational way.

WhatsApp has become a ubiquitous business tool in recent years, finding its way into almost every industry and vertical. In regions like LATAM, India, and Africa, WhatsApp is heavily used for processes like invoicing clients, receiving payments, and setting up meetings.

In the same way, whether employees communicate internally, with vendors or customers, there’s no denying that WhatsApp has morphed into the greatest messaging app the world has ever seen.  

When most managers think of how to handle their business processes, they think of using complex-dinosaur-dedicated software, like SalesForce for sales or Asana for managing projects and timelines. But what if you could get the same processes done over a tool everybody has and was already using? What if we told you that you could transform WhatsApp into a remote control to any of your enterprise systems?

Here are the top 7 business functions you could centralize and automate using WhatsApp:

1. Incident Management

Reducing the mean-time to-resolution (MTTR) over WhatsApp 

Incident management is a critical part for businesses of all sizes, as combines the practices, processes, and solutions that enable teams to detect, investigate and respond to incidents.

The main goal is to restore service operations as quickly as possible. A timely and efficient resolution will minimize business impact and increase productivity. 

The process can be summarized into 5 main steps: identification and categorization, escalation, diagnosis, resolution, and closing of the incident.

As this has been cleared, for identifying incidents, many companies use service desks, and then the data flows into complex IMS. These service desks are time-consuming, have a high friction experience and dont allow users reporting incidents to have a single and fast point of contact with their IT departments.

The same happens with the closing process of an incident, in which the reporting and documentation of the tickets are often non-shared with other relevant departments across the organization.

Therefore, one of the key strategies to have effective IM processes is achieving the lowest mean time to resolution and to document in detail every step taken into resolution. 

What has been happening in many organizations is that the steps of identification, escalation, and even closing are being notified and recorded over WhatsApp, and teams have often to record it again manually in their central service desk and then into the IMS system, losing time to resolution.    

In RELE.AI we have created a simple workflow to allows your employees access to the backend system from the WhatsApp chats. You can:

2. HR functions

Making life easier for your teams 

Why do so many HR departments require their employees to manually handle their requests in HR systems when in the practical sense they are being done over WhatsApp? For example, vacation requests.

Does your organization have manual processes around vacation requests? Or perhaps have to force your employees to log on to a separate system to request vacation days or know how many days are available? Now you can:

3. Field operations

Improving mobile experience and decreasing administrative tasks

You have a large team running many business processes on the field. From site management, reviewing product placement at a store, or even signing up customers to your central database. 

A study conducted by TrackVia, showed that “operational advantages derived from mobile-enabled field work and inspections help accelerate time to market, control costs and provide capabilities that improve the customer experience—resulting in key competitive benefits for a business”.  

Usually, this mobile-enabling requires the development or integration of a custom app, but your employees use WhatsApp. We designed full customization of workflows such as:

Simply embed them to your organization by using WhatsApp as a front end to your backend applications!

4. Logistics

Going mobile on delivery processes over WhatsApp

Do you run many logistics processes internally and externally with a fleet of delivery drivers? These processes are typically manual tasks and in many cases done through the good old pen and paper. Operations managers want real-time data visibility of their product shipping and often fleet drivers are reluctant to update manually their detailed routes, times, assignments.

We have created a workflow in order to help outbound operation teams connect to their company systems: 

With RELE.AI, you can digitize and automate these processes by leveraging our workflow engine and use WhatsApp as a front end. 

5. Approval processes

Forget about waiting for the “approved” email reply 

Sending an email to request approval is not a process. With RELE.AI, you can convert your employees’ WhatsApp accounts into a network of productivity. You can: 

The RELE.AI SDK allows you to keep logs of everything that runs through the system. 

6. Fetch reports and data

Sharing information leads to data transparency

Sales, finance, upper management, you name it. Everyone needs access to critical data at their fingertips. Very often accessing this data requires more than a 5 step process in different systems across the company.

Create automations and data sharing models which generate  transparency with RELE.AI workflows: 

Save valuable time as you forget about having to open separate systems or download classic CSV files.

7. Onboarding

Get everyone at your teams right on track with the use of your central systems

All of us at one point in time have someone onboard to our central system. It could be a partner, vendor, employee, or external consultant. Why use manual forms or waste resources to design a landing page or special app?

You can securely allow anyone to onboard on your backend systems by leveraging WhatsApp as a frontend through the RELE.AI SDK and Workflow Engine. 

The growing and unique challenge 

These are just a few examples that can be automated through WhatsApp at any company around the world. More and more, companies face a growing and unique challenge: employees want to use WhatsApp while companies expect them to use the existing central systems. With RELE.AI, companies can bring these central systems and business processes to the simplicity of WhatsApp. 

Everyone wins. Employees are happy to use the platform they already use on a daily basis. Companies increase productivity through the RELE.AI workflow engine. Finally, all data remains secure and private because of RELE.AI’s zero data policy (we keep no data). 

Would you like to take advantage of WhatsApp in a new and innovative way? Contact us.