Is Your WhatsApp Sales Data at Risk? Follow These 4 Best Practices

How secure is your lead data? Leaking personal information from leads and customers can do irreparable damage to your business’s reputation. When you’re doing sales over chat, it can be a challenge to keep this data secure.

Even if the chats are encrypted to outsiders, sales agents often have full access to leads’ names and phone numbers and may use that information inappropriately.

Personal identifiable information (PII) protection laws vary across countries, so you don’t want to take any risks. Leads and customers should be able to have confidence that any details shared with your business won’t be passed on to other parties.

If you’re using WhatsApp, businesses can only send messages to customers who consent to receive messages from them. When a customer consents, they trust their contact details to remain with your company.

How can you make sure their data remains secure? Follow these best practices.

Don’t Allow Sales Agents to Use Personal WhatsApp Accounts

WhatsApp conversations are end-to-end encrypted, so you don’t need to worry about someone hacking into chats with customers, but there are other ways information can be leaked. Many businesses allow salespeople to use personal WhatsApp accounts to do business.

Salespeople get leads into their personal phones, and the company has no control over what the agents do with that lead data. They may be spamming people or pursuing their own competing interests, and if they leave the company, they’ll take the lead data with them.

Customer Success Manager Asher Phillips notes the risks of this: “Data privacy and security concerns would also arise from this, as there is next to no control over the spread of customer data - this would result in potential customers losing trust in the business and moving on to competitors.”

Store Data in a Secure Platform

Rather than using personal WhatsApp accounts, we recommend using WhatsApp API with a conversation management platform that’s also a WhatsApp BSP. This ensures that lead data stays within the company as all contacts come in through a single platform.

However, when you’re using a third-party platform, you’ll also want to make sure that’s safe from hackers. When you’re choosing a platform, check what cloud storage provider it uses and what security certification it has, if any.

While storing data in the cloud offers considerable data protection, note that the level of security depends entirely on the provider. For instance, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are known to be some of the most reputable and safest providers.

ISO certification demonstrates a platform’s commitment to security. The ISO 27001:2022 certification, awarded by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is a globally recognized standard that focuses on establishing, maintaining and continually improving a systematic data security risk management system.

Use 2-Factor Authentication or Single Sign-On

While having a shared inbox is more secure than using multiple WhatsApp accounts, human error also opens up your lead data to risks.

It’s common for data breaches to occur because of easily-guessed passwords or sharing passwords. With 2-factor authentication, agents verify their identity with phone number or email so you can be sure only authorized persons have access to your lead data.

Adding single sign-on is an even more convenient and secure way to authenticate your agents. With this method, they can log in once with personal information like a one-time password, and then their device will be recognized so they can log in with just a click after that.

That way, salespeople won’t need to worry about forgetting passwords. When they want to chat with a customer, all they need to do to log in is click.

Protect Personally Identifiable Information with Masking

However, no matter how secure your platform is and how strong your log-in authentication is, if many salespeople have access to customer information, there’s still a risk of leaks. With a conversation management platform, all agents have access to conversations.

While this is a benefit for manager visibility and so that an available agent can quickly respond to any lead who comes in, it also opens up privacy concerns. When all agents can see contacts’ emails and phone numbers, they may potentially violate privacy and consent.

Data misuse and legal concerns may arise, especially when agents are working remotely. There may be similar issues to using personal WhatsApp as sales agents can steal lead data when they leave the company or use it for personal gain on the side.

The solution to this? Use email and phone number masking so that only certain individuals can see leads’ emails and phone numbers. All agents can see the messages in the inbox and respond to them, but they won’t have access to this sensitive information.

With respond.io, enterprises have access to the feature, and it’s ideal for businesses with stringent privacy regulations.

Ensure Customer Confidence by Securing Your Sales Data

Think about how many people in your company have access to WhatsApp lead information. Do you promise customers that their data will be secure? How do you guarantee this?

Protect sales data by using a secure platform like respond.io to manage conversations and data from leads and limit the information salespeople have access to. While you may trust your agents, the fewer people who have access to sensitive information, the safer the information will be.

And don’t forget to subscribe for more insights on doing sales and marketing over chat. Next week, we’ll show you how three of our customers in the education industry have increased conversions through conversations.