Power of simplicity : Whatsapp is not IM, it’s a CRM

Whatsapp as CRM

My wife runs a small garment business from home. Every week a new parcel lands in my home. The supplier is 800 km away from my place and he doesn't have a website to look at.So out of curiosity, I asked how does she select the designs and order them. Her answer laid the foundation of this post. Shrugging her shoulders, she answered me in one word "Whatsapp".

The supplier Whatsapp’s her the pictures of the latest designs. She confirms her selection through Whatsapp and bang, in a couple of days, the fashion is in my home.

For me, Whatsapp was an IM until I heard this. It was an app for time pass. To share jokes and funny pics, that’s it. Nothing more than that.

Intrigued by this, I spend some time finding cases of Whatsapp being more than IM. And I found many other fascinating stories.

I recently tied up with a financial advisor.in the first meeting, he talked everything and also if I use Whatsapp. Now he sends me market updates, performance reports and tips using Whatsapp

Recently we had used Whatsapp for event management spanned across different locations. The organizers of the event had to start the event at the same time. To ensure security, we password protected the event details. The challenge was to send the password to everybody at the same time.The event was being held outdoors and so email was out of the question. And SMS has no delivery guarantee.Whatsapp came to rescue again.

Sadly, but Whatsapp has been used to starts riots too.

These are all applications derived by the users. They are not publicized by Whatsapp. 

The power of Simplicity

The intriguing question is what makes Whatsapp adapt so easily to the needs of it users. A tool which is not at all serious thing for me is a business driver for another person. Whatsapp is nothing more than a message sharing tool and that’s it. It doesn’t have any complex features. And this simplicity of Whatsapp makes it so easily adaptable. This interaction forces us to think about the power of simplicity.

Simple here is not plain, boring and timid. Rather simple here is empowering, enabling. It is simple for the user to leverage it and not necessarily simple to develop it. 

A simple product or service lets users derive their own applications and usage. The simplicity of the product allows the users to become innovators. They define their own use cases. Technically, it is crowd-sourcing of features/services. 

And this makes it more powerful and difficult to beat kind of a beast.

For SME, their only priority is growing the business. They don't care about the tool or the core purpose of the tool. If it helps them in their business, great. They will embrace it.

Because people are inventing the usage, it is difficult for users to move them away from the platform and that makes it challenging for competition to break through. . A team in a corporate office cannot match the collective ideas generated by millions of users.

The stats about Whatsapp usage resonate the power of simplicity very well..

Whatsapp has 700 million active users, it handles 30 bn message/day compared to 20bs SMS/day served by all telcos put together.

Have you used Whatsapp for more than IM? Please share your story. Do you agree that simplicity is the most powerful thing? Use comments section to voice your opinion.