Should my staffing business use WhatsApp?
Immediate answer “yes” Customers love it. It improves service. Staff you are just bringing on board love it. They can pull in their pals to help your business. All good stuff. Free and easy.
However, this ease-of-use comes at a cost. As soon as you create a group you have given away everyone’s numbers. There is a GDPR issue there with big fines. But the theft of data within any large group is the real risk to your business.
Every one of those people can communicate to your group and create their own subgroup and innocently or nefariously give your data away. That is your hard earned qualified vetted staff bank; i.e. your business. By the way, every one of those folks has signed their data away to Facebook to use as it sees fit. That includes messages and photos. Now think about the pass code for the client warehouse door you sent a trusted staffer last week! Did you share secure information over WhatsApp?
Accepted and easy
WhatsApp is the “gorilla player” in a fairly crowded market for push messaging. Next only to SMS (text messages), it is a reliable fast way to communicate and is accepted and understood by billions worldwide. You can grow and handle large groups of people and send and receive messages.
BUT………..
So what’s the problem? Politicians have wrecked their careers. Staff can really damage your business. Why are the highest fines ever paid by commercial companies to regulator specifically for using WhatsApp? The contents are accessible by courts as illustrated by recent cases of police abuse of information that has cost their employers huge sums.
These are big businesses but the regulators including the court of public opinion could be after us small and medium enterprises next.
WhatsApp: friend or foe
I love WhatsApp. You should use WhatsApp for clients if they like it – but carefully and keep it to one or two contacts per client. Do not use large client lists unless you are sure you are not giving away your client list. So, if we apply common sense it is a great sales and customer service tool.
Managing staff
In some unregulated staffing businesses, WhatsApp is fun and widely accepted and understood. Promo, experiential and FM, hospitality and other contract staff always have it switched on. It is used widely at our clients and at our competitors’ clients. Likewise, security guards and door managers, airside workers and care staff use it all the time. However, the environments in which they work are heavily regulated.
Once staff have been attracted by the ease of use of WhatsApp in the hiring process, we recommend that you move to a private messaging platform or use SMS messaging. Most systems for staffing agencies like security companies have a push messaging component. For example, we have AXLR8 Chat and its sister AXLR8 Notifications. It is immediate and media-rich like WhatsApp but you control the groups:
- Visibility – nobody sees other people’s contact details so they cannot give them away innocently or otherwise.
- Focus – people cannot carry on their own conversation and get on to subjects like whether it is better to go work for their uncle’s company or sewing seeds of discontent about your company for their own gain
- Information scope – if you say turn up at 10: nobody gets to private message others saying 11 is OK because the team leader and client never get in till then.
A couple of case studies if you are still not convinced.
- We had a situation where we set up an application for SIA guards for one of our new clients (let’s call them “A”). They won a huge contract and needed staff fast. Another partner company (“B”) with a WhatsApp group of 3000 guards wanted to subcontract their staff to A. They sent out a WhatsApp and asked staff to register on A’s system through our form but say where they came from. However, for all sorts of reasons, over 1000 staff registered and only 80 actually said where they heard about the opportunity. Both companies are smart and honest but it took them several months to sort it out. We could have given them a special link to the application form if we had known.
Everyone has 20:20 vison in hindsight. - In another case, a (European) client has an ongoing legal case where the employee has publicised her scheme to get paid for more hours than she worked to other staff. She has never met those people but they are on her employer’s WhatsApp groups and many are now on her group being fed appalling lies and personal gripes about our client agency. This is a company I have known for 12 years and can vouch for their honesty and professionalism, staff care and industry leading pay and conditions. The owner is a beautiful diamond. Success sometimes brings envy. One person on WhatsApp can damage that hard earned reputation quickly at zero cost for their own gain.
Be careful of your hard earned business data. Treat it like your most valuable non-human asset.
If you have any similar issues and would like independent advice on data security, feel free to call our consultants on 01344 776500 for a confidential discussion.