Picture a Saturday morning, month end, at a busy wholesaler. The queue is out the door, the trader is counting stock, and a customer is waiting on change. Now imagine a company rep leaning over the counter to ask, “Have you downloaded our app yet?”
The trader will smile. The app will stay undownloaded.
That isn’t stubbornness. It’s a sensible read of priorities. The trader has a business to run and a phone that already does what they need. Most of what they need happens inside WhatsApp.
Too often, the people who build the technology have never set foot in the worlds of the people they are building for. We design from air-conditioned offices in Sandton, and we often build for the wrong room.
For twenty years, business technology has been designed around people at desks: portals, intranets, dashboards, logins. Yet much of South Africa’s commercial life happens far from a desk, in spaza shops, on shop floors, in store aisles and on the road. These are the people brands most need to reach, and the ones our tools are least likely to reach.
The usual response is to push harder: more training, more reminders, more incentives to sign up. We think the problem is the premise. Far better to send the technology to where they already are.
The experience people see, and the engine that makes it work
Most conversations about WhatsApp in business start and stop at marketing: broadcasts, chatbots and automated replies. All of these serve an important purpose, but WhatsApp is so much more powerful than that.
We think of it as an experience. WhatsApp is already familiar to almost everyone, which means people can engage with it without learning a new platform or navigating a new interface.
Behind that familiar experience can sit a much larger engine: data, workflows, permissions, reporting and analytics, all working together. For the person, it is a simple interaction that feels natural and sits comfortably among the many conversations they have throughout the day.
Behind the scenes, it can be a sophisticated, integrated workflow that captures information, connects
systems, analyses data and returns meaningful outcomes.
Here is what this looks like in practice
We run a General Trade campaign that rewards traders for buying more product. To take part, a trader messages on WhatsApp and scans in the barcode from the pack. That’s it. Seconds later, they can see where they stand on a leaderboard, and a little friendly rivalry with the trader down the road does the rest.
Behind that exchange, a great deal is happening. Each message is tied to a specific outlet, and each purchase is recorded down to the individual product. Every customer has their own target, measured across trading weeks rather than one campaign moment. The platform works out who has earned a reward, issues it, and tracks whether it is redeemed. Brand teams watch it all unfold in real time.
The trader experiences a chat
The business gets verified, outlet-level purchasing data it could never have collected through a form, or through a portal that nobody opened. That gap between how simple something feels and how sophisticated it is underneath is where good technology earns its keep. It should absorb complexity so that your customer doesn’t have to.
The same thinking, further down the chain
The principle holds at the other end of the trade ecosystem, too. Field teams are hard to manage at scale: you need to know who turned up, what they did, what the store looked like and what shoppers said. On our activation platforms, WhatsApp is how shifts are checked in and out, and how photographs of execution arrive as proof of work. To the person in the store, it’s a message thread. To the client, it’s evidence and a live picture of the market.
Why the custom application isn’t always the solution
We aren’t saying that apps don’t work. We aren’t saying that apps are redundant. Plenty of businesses use impressive technology and run exceptionally successful campaigns and operational practices.
What we are saying is that it’s not one size fits all. For many markets in South Africa, and specifically within the General Trade environment, an incentive has to be easy and must feel worth the effort. It must survive a Saturday rush and patchy signal. Technology that ignores human behaviour can fail, however elegant it is.
That’s why we bring technology, people, execution and insight together. ConnectGroup builds the platforms. Our parent company, MegaVision, brings deep experience in activations and field execution. The platform is designed by people who know what the field looks like, and the field is run by people who understand the platform. We aren’t a vendor who hands over a license and disappears, and we aren’t an agency that merchandises or reps for brands. We build the technology, put it to work in the market and turn the results into insight.
Ask a different question
The future of business technology probably isn’t one more app, or an intranet everyone is finally forced to use. In a country as varied and spread out as ours, that plan would always leave most people behind.
The alternative is simple to say and harder to build: keep the front door familiar and put the intelligence in the infrastructure. So the next time a business asks how to get its people to adopt its technology, try asking something else. Where are they already?
By Jane Eriksen and Warren Canning, Co-Founders, ConnectGroup