#24 Never use WhatsApp for Business… for business

 

#24 Never use WhatsApp for Business… for business

Never use WhatsApp for Business… for business. Why? Let me tell you a story.

Background

It looks like most companies are unable to get out of their core competency and at best can only become second best to real leaders. Let’s consider the history.

IBM core competency was mainframes and consulting. They were innovative enough to invent a personal computer, but were they able to monetize that advantage? No. They just did not get it. And their OS/2 attempt to enter PC software business was an ultimate failure. Not to mention that their Lotus suite is only remembered today by industry veterans. Long story short, they sold their PC business to Lenovo in 2005. R.I.P. IBM PC business.

Microsoft instead was able to utilize the competitive advantage of PCs. Their core competency was the common OS and Office applications. They did not care who makes PCs as log as they were running Windows and MS Office. Microsoft was also the first to provide a free Internet browser – Internet Explorer. But… they did not get Internet. And neither what people needed when using Internet. Sure, they copycatted successful competitors, but Bing and Azure still second-grade in the business. Long story short, they discarded Internet Explorer in 2018-20 and switched to (Google) Chromium-based Edge. R.I.P. Internet Explorer.

Google got Internet and provided a leading search engine, which is still #1. But social was something they did not get. They tried. They hired Microsoft GM Vic Gundora to build Google+ social network. Vic was so good at presenting failures as wins that would make Trump envious. When a rumor came that he may be invited to be the new CEO of Microsoft, the comment from one of Google engineers was “I am sure that will be a huge win for both of our companies.” Long story short, R.I.P. Google+.

Facebook (and now Meta, including WhatsApp) got social. Their core competency was a consumer (retail) social. It did not include working with businesses (b2b). Nevertheless they tried to provide “WhatsApp for Business”). It looks like R.I.P. is not too far. Why?

Real story

Our company heavily relied on WhatsApp for business. We believed in this channel and its future. We did not use it to send messages, but rather just used it to allow customers to address us through this channel. More than that, we planned to setup such channel for the same usage for our customers – large businesses in the financial industry.

And then we’ve got this (BTW both links at the bottom were broken):

Ok, both Facebook and Google unfortunately use such rude and cryptic messages when cutting off their consumer customers without and hope for fixing the situation. After all, Gmail has ~2 billion users, Facebook – ~3 billion users, WhatsApp – ~3 billions users. It sounds sad, but for them one user more, one user less does not make any difference. They are in a mass consumer market.

But what about B2B? Again, Meta is a mass consumer business. They don’t get B2B (see above). Yes, most users of WhatsApp for Business are advertisers (spam), but businesses like us are not. We don't send messages, we receive them. In fact, we could have started a new line of business for Meta, but alas… Meta does not get it.

And now how can we do that? Can you imagine us coming to a multi-billion business like State Farm Insurance and saying “We can give you a new communication channel with customers. It’s cool, it’s modern, it is used and preferred by most young people, which is your future market… well, but if Meta would be in a bad mood they can kick you out anytime, if their AI monitoring will make a mistake”. Do you think such pitch has any chance to work?

So, what’s wrong?

  • First of all you don’t close the door to communications.

  • Second, you don’t hide reasoning, even if you don’t know it yourself. Which is probably the case with Meta, since both banning and review they do using poorly tested AI models. But clear explanation of a problem is a must.

  • Third, if you suspect problems with account integrity, you don’t close business account, normally you just reset the password.

  • And finally, arrogance is bad, especially when you have serious competition like Viber or Telegram.

What’s next?

For us? We are still trying to fix the issue. We may have to register a new account. Considering that Meta proved itself as unscrupulous business partner, we may switch to another messaging platform like Viber or Telegram. And after all, we always will have webchat. So, it’s not that bad.

But how can we recommend Meta and WhatsApp to our business customers after what happened? I don’t know, I just don’t know.



Comments

  1. YuryJune 28, 2025 at 2:18 AM

    Using messengers for business sounds extremely terribly to me. Email is way better for that: less distractive, makes the sender to write full massage at once, easy to be put on a side to process later, can't be easily blocked (both sender and receiver) by stupid rules of a country or organization, no need to install questionable apps, no attachment to a phone number and much more.

    Each time when a business can't work with me via email I just walk away. Recently I did an exception, regret it in a week.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. EldarJuly 3, 2025 at 4:59 AM

      You are 101% right. I feel the same. But younger generations cringe on email and crazy about messaging. And our CEO believes that this is the future. :-(

      Delete

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