Communication tool: WHATSAPP VS. SLACK
It has become frequent to use WhatsApp as a communication tool in the workplace, to the point where it is not strange to receive messages related to work during the night or on the weekends.
As time has passed, we have become accustomed to normalizing this practice, opening the door of personal life and time to work matters, causing an overflow of messages thanks to the many group chats, prayer chains or simple friendly conversations.
In order to solve this issue, the developers of WhatsApp, created a “spin off” of this recognized instant messaging application, called WhatsApp Business, which is intended to serve exclusively business purposes. However, WhatsApp is still a tool dedicated to social and entertainment, so why associate it with work?
We all know that in addition to WhatsApp, there are other specialized and optimized tools in the market to serve this purpose, such as Slack, open channels of ERP like Bitrix, or even more customizable ones like Sococo, which allow you to have a direct and instant communication with customers, partners and employees.
Some of the benefits offered by the use of exclusive channels for the workplace are:
- Having a formal record of conversations.
- Monitoring different agreements between the customers-supplier, employee-boss and partners.
- Having best practices by not mixing the personal matters with work.
- Getting faster response times.
- Having a clear work focus and better contextualization of conversations.
SOME INFORMATION ABOUT SLACK
As an exclusive instant messaging tool for work communication, Slack has excellent features that can hardly be implemented by WhatsApp Business. Some of them are:
- It allows to personalize notifications, to deactivate them, to activate them all or some of them, for example, we can enable only the notifications when we receive direct messages or messages that contain previously selected words. If you want to be updated on the status of a project your team is developing for a specific client, you can agree with them to use the project’s name every time something related to it is written. This functionality can be very useful if you do team planning.
- Slack offers many combinations to customize the interface. As we are different people, we usually don’t like the same colors and styles, so why force us to see the same interface every day? This feature gives us a fresh and creative environment making our work life so much more enjoyable.
- Wide range of emojis. If you are one of those people who worry about not being able to use emojis in other instant messaging channels, this tool is the complete opposite. In addition to the possibility of using all the emojis available in WhatsApp, we can also select if we want to use plain text or different emojis types like Apple, Google, Twitter or Emoji One.
With this information, we hope that before mixing your personal and work communication channels, you decide to explore some of the available options that will make your work more efficient both in teams and individually. We encourage you to try them!
