Why are there so many paid options for Emergency Notification tools when WhatsApp is free to use?

Seems like a reasonable question – most streets or communities have a WhatsApp group; when the power is down at number 8 or the internet is down at number 10 (again?!) a WhatsApp alert is guaranteed within 5 minutes. 

It seems resilient to power, internet and common-sense outages at all hours.  This must translate into a great solution for Emergency Communications, right?

Let’s look at how to set WhatsApp up as an emergency communication tool.

• Pick a group owner to create the group.  Someone must be the seed for the group, they can create the group, assign a relevant picture and invite members to join.

• Add all the staff members.  After adding your immediate contacts (those in your phone book already), you then need to get the rest of the firm to join the group.  You can’t force someone to join, but you can invite them.  To invite directly, add their phone number to your address book and send an invitation directly from WhatsApp.  For mass invitations you can go into Administration and generate a QR code or an email link and send this to people you want to join.  When they click the link, they are members of your group.

• Send messages to the group.  This is the easy part – go into the group, create a message, SEND TO ALL.

• Track responses  Swipe left on your message and see who has read the message.

What could go wrong with Business Communications in WhatsApp?

Well – plenty really.  Here are a few nightmares waiting to happen:

• Unwanted messages – People are amused by the strangest of things, Leslie in accounts gets an hilarious meme from their sister on a night out and thinks it’s so funny everyone should see it and shares on your emergency communication group.  This offends 30% of your staff who turn off notifications and one, who thinks it’s directed at them and raises an HR incident.

• Who’s Who? – If someone is not in your contact list they appear as a number – from the picture everyone recognises them as CJ from HR and fills in their name – they are now a contact on everyone’s phone – for ever.

• Banter – You don’t hold the board meeting in the pub because it’s not an appropriate environment.  Opening WhatsApp isn’t setting the scene for important communication – it is for most, countless threads of back-and-forth banter loosely disguised as a conversation in amongst which you are trying to alert people to a suspect package in the mail room.

• Oversharing – It’s good to share, but that status image and single line of text will be visible to all your colleagues.  All manner of uses for the status image in WhatsApp not all of which should be shared unwittingly with the rest of the firm.

• Leavers and joiners – Every time someone leaves the firm, you need to remove them from the WhatsApp group.  You can ask nicely that they delete all contacts they may have stored locally but there’s nothing to force this to happen.  Bad leavers with the personal details of their manager’s personal contact information are rarely a good mix.   Joiners on the other hand must be initiated into the group, thrown straight into a turmoil about what they are sharing what everyone else is sharing and what people are saying.

• Lost phones – these are not going to be corporate devices running WhatsApp so are less likely to have anti-virus / anti-track and anti-malware software installed.  You cant even force an unlock PIN to be present on the device.  In the wrong hands that device has exposed all your staff to the wrong people.

• Borrowed phones – Like lost phones, personal devices can be shared around family (Mum – can I play Roblox on your phone?) or when less aware picked up and mis-used by “friends” on a night out.  With no password protection WhatsApp is an easy click option open to misuse.

What features should a great Emergency Communication solution have?

• Multi-Channel communication – Unlike WhatsApp you need a number of channels at your disposal for communication in a crisis – if something is THAT important there is going to be competition for the airwaves and bandwidth.  As a minimum have SMS and Land-line calls in your armoury, add Push notifications, email (it will get there eventually) and direct in-app messages for the complete package.

• Segregation – You don’t need everybody in the firm to have the contact details of everybody else – unless it’s desk numbers which are usually published.  A great solution will allow you to segregate teams and people and restrict access to those that need to know.

• Audit – Not just who sent what – even WhatsApp will reveal that information, but full details of who has accessed the system just for a browse, who edited the users, who sent which messages and to whom – and of those, who read and responded – full audit where personal data is being processed is vital.

• Pre-written messages – Nobody can expect someone to think perfectly straight in a crisis – a good solution will allow you to pre-configure messages for every situation thought up in the calm light of a table-top drill with pre-filled distribution lists.  When the server room water leak detection system activates a single click should rouse the troops into action.

• Security – WhatsApp hasn’t had a perfect history in this regard, given the size and volume of messages it’s done pretty well but there are some well documented cases of messages being shared inappropriately.  Your solution should be built with data protection at it’s centre, from database design through encryption to delivery and use.

• Volume – Minimum throughput for messages should see the whole organisation alerted within 30 seconds of the message being sent out.  Why so fast?  If only half the team get the message then speculation will run like wild-fire through the  not-yet-received community.  Our minimum delivery rate is 1,200 per minute.

• Reply options – You could invest in some very loud speakers and broadcast your message from the roof-tops if you didn’t care about listening to replies – alternatively your staff should be able to respond to messages (and for you to see the responses) whether that’s through “Press 1 to let us know you are OK”, or SMS reply of a smiley or a thumbs up, a simple entry in a compact web form or someone else checking in staff they have contacted.  All these options should be available, flexible and monitored.

   

Conclusion

For a small group, WhatsApp is a cheap option for communicating at small scale.  This works best when the members of the group know each-other in some way personally, respect boundaries and have a common understanding of the role of the WhatsApp group.

When the small group option is no-longer viable the benefits of bringing in the experts with a full Emergency Communication solution far outweigh the risks of you and your staff getting things wrong.  You don’t just buy security, reliability, range, throughput, availability and coverage – add pre-written messages, business continuity information, recovery site maps, resilience, two way communication and post incident reporting and you may have a good business case.  

The cost is not as much as you may think, messaging is cheap these days – contact us to discuss your options 🙂