I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the ones asking to send it via WhatsApp. It would make sense to me to have a non-email contingency for email.
That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product.
Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it would still likely leave a sour taste in your client’s mouth if their new vendor couldn’t even get their shit together to keep their email up and running smoothly.
> but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications.
Before the Russian/Ukraine war, I worked for a US company that did business operations on Russian cloud providers - one (very major one I don't want to name here publicly) had their main support in some sketchy all-russian telegram channel that I only could access via my personal device. You'd type your issue in english, get a bunch of russian responses, and then sometimes hours/days later your issue would mysteriously vanish.
> That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications
...and yet WhatsApp Business exists to do exactly that. In developing countries, some businesses use WhatsApp as the only written-communication channel (supplemented via voice calls). For over a billion people, their smartphone is the primary - oftentimes
only - computing platform. Business communication over WhatsApp is not as awkward as you suppose it is, and all businesses, including large ones, have to meet their clients on whatever platform(s) they happen to be on.
Again, I think that view is US centric. Many other countries have WhatsApp as the default. I'm not even suggesting that they should have WhatsApp as the default, just describing the reality as I am seeing it. And yes even the biggest companies and government entities are using WhatsApp. When I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a US passenger freaked out over it and I had to explain to her that this is just how it's done in LATAM.
> I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a US passenger freaked out over it and I had to explain to her that this is just how it's done in LATAM.
You had a mid-sized to corporate business sending passports over WhatsApp? I highly doubt that.
This is not even coming from a “US-centric” view. This is coming from a “that will never pass any sort of compliance or hell corporate governance” sniff test.
I am describing reality as I see it, at this point you're basically calling me a liar. You could have simply googled it yourself; e.g. "is it normal to use WhatsApp for business in Latin America?" to which the resulting summary is "Across LATAM, WhatsApp is used by citizens as a way to communicate with family and friends and is being increasingly used by businesses big and small to provide customer service, make sales, take bookings, and more." Note the --> big <-- part of that. You don't need to rely on my assertions the when there is so much evidence readily available. I have no idea why you're arguing with me and do not care that you don't believe me - what on earth would I have to gain by lying to you in this way. It makes no sense.
Italy here. Photo ids via WhatsApp is not normal but it happens. WhatsApp video calls as proof of identity are normal: showing your face and a photo id is a way to get formally identified by many of the identity providers for the state digital id platform.
