The platform’s immediacy, ubiquity and acceptance by people of all age groups make it a hugely popular personal messaging tool that is on track to reach 38.35 million UK users by 2025, according to Statista forecasts. With such a large user base, WhatsApp clearly also has the potential to be an effective way for businesses to interact with consumers. Meta certainly thinks so. In 2018, it launched WhatsApp Business as a separate, business focused app that lets users send and receive WhatsApp messages linked to a business phone number – and it has been enhancing and expanding the platform ever since. Today, WhatsApp Business works very well for sole traders as a way of separating business and personal communications and accessing additional business oriented features. However, according to NTA owner and founder Paul White, it still has limitations for businesses in which a task might be carried out by more than one person using different devices. “If you have multiple people working in a business, it becomes very hard to share information because you can only have the information on one device or on one computer. That’s how WhatsApp Business currently works, i.e. in a very similar way to the WhatsApp service everyone is used to,” he says. “It’s very hard to transfer a message from one person to another, whether you are using WhatsApp Business or the standard WhatsApp, and there’s no co ordination, so if someone gets a message and they’re off for a week, how do you make sure that isn’t missed?”

Whatex
To overcome these limitations, NTA recently unveiled a new product, Whatex, that lets multiple users within a business share a WhatsApp Business connection integrated with their NTA hosted telephony service and enjoy the benefits of centralised visibility and control of messages. “Whatex gives you the ability to take that WhatsApp Business connection and share it with multiple users within the office, taking you from a single user and single bit of software to a single instance with multiple users. You have the ability to share messages and, because the software can work like an IVR on a phone system, you can route incoming messages to the relevant department. You can even record WhatsApp messages and keep a log of conversations with someone who has contacted you via your WhatsApp page or, more likely, by clicking the WhatsApp logo on your website. “WhatsApp is very instant, very live and very ‘in’ at the moment. It seems to be a communications channel that everyone likes to use and that most people have in their pocket.”

New integrations
White says that NTA is continuing to develop Whatex to take advantage of WhatsApp’s popularity, citing two new integrations with the NTA phone service due to be launched in 2024. “The first, which really sets Whatex apart, is for missed call alerts. If someone calls our call centre, we can spot that they are ringing from an 07 number, so if they hang up before speaking to someone we can immediately send them a WhatsApp message saying ‘You’ve just tried calling us. We’re really sorry we didn’t get your call. Talk to us on WhatsApp’. I think that’s quite a powerful feature. “We can do that on individual extensions as well. So, if someone goes through to an extension and doesn’t get answered, we could send back a message saying ‘You’ve just tried calling Paul at NTA. I’m really sorry I didn’t take your call. Start a conversation with me on WhatsApp’. “The other integration we’re looking to do will enable someone to start a conversation on WhatsApp with someone they haven’t been able to reach on the phone. We’re creating buttons on our desk phones and our on screen softphone that you can press to send the last person called a WhatsApp message saying ‘I’ve just tried calling you. Call me back on this number or start a conversation on here’.” White adds that NTA can also do custom integrations to help customers with specific workflows, for example automatically sending renewal reminders by WhatsApp (rather than email) or introducing a dedicated button on a desk phone to initiate WhatsApp messages relating to a common, repeatable process. “One company we are working with has thousands of cars out on rental and regularly has people ringing in because they need to replace a tyre. At the moment, they take down the caller’s details and send them a text message or an email with account details and instructions on what to do. They have asked us to put a ‘Tyre notification’ button on their phone that they can press to automatically send the caller a WhatsApp message containing information on the tyres needed, account details and so on. It’s all about speeding up communications and making things more interactive.”

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