Viber CRM: what a sales leader should settle before choosing

A client writes to whoever answered last time. The question is whose phone that was.

In much of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and parts of the Middle East and Asia, clients are used to Viber. They don’t look for a website and they don’t call. They open the chat with the person who once answered them. A year later that chat holds prices, photos of documents, promises to pay. All of it on one phone. Often a personal one.

The general questions are in CRM for messengers: 12 questions before you buy. This is only what is specific to Viber. These are not questions for a tool. They are questions a sales leader puts to themselves before looking for a Viber CRM.

Whose number, whose phone

A Viber account is tied to a phone number. The primary device is the phone itself. The desktop app works as a secondary device: it links to the account on the phone and doesn’t live without it.

The consequence is simple. Whoever holds the SIM card and the phone holds the clients. If the number is personal, the company works with its clients through someone else’s property.

Ask yourself:

• Whose name are the SIM cards in — the ones the team uses to write to clients? The company’s or the reps’?
• Where does the chat backup live? Viber saves it to the cloud account the phone is linked to. If the phone is personal, so is the cloud.
• What happens when someone leaves? Do the number, the phone and the backup stay with the company or walk out with them?

What it looks like in practice. A rep works their last day and takes the phone home — it’s theirs. A week later a regular client writes to them as usual: she needs a new batch. He answers, now on behalf of another company. The sales leader finds out a month later, when the client drops out of the reports.

A company number that doesn’t change when the team does is an address. Clients find the company through it, not a particular person. It doesn’t get fired.

Who owns the conversation

In Viber, agreements live in voice messages, photos and forwarded files. If a conversation belongs to one person, everything promised in it leaves with them.

Ask yourself:

• If a rep doesn’t show up tomorrow, who can read what they promised a client and on what terms?
• How many of your clients know the company only by one number? That number is the cost of one person leaving.

Three things in Viber are worth settling in advance, as company rules.

Deleted messages. A sent message can be deleted for both sides. Decide whether a rep may delete their own messages to a client and who looks into disputes. Especially when amounts, deadlines or payment details are involved.

Disappearing messages. Viber lets you set a timer after which messages vanish. Handy in private life, risky at work. An agreement that has vanished doesn’t belong to the company.

Hidden chats. A chat can be hidden behind a separate code and won’t show in the main list. You need a rule: work conversations happen only in ordinary chats the company can see.

In short: whatever is said to a client on the company’s behalf stays with the company.

Who knows what about a client

A single Viber chat often holds the price, the client’s documents and their debt. Access to it is not a formality.

• Who in the company actually needs to read other people’s conversations — only the team lead, or someone else?
• Who can take the whole base? There should be fewer of them than readers. Ideally one, and everyone knows who.
• What happens on someone’s last day: who closes their access to work accounts and checks that it’s done? Write it down as a rule, not a request.

Separately — linked devices. Viber settings show the list of computers and tablets where the account is open. Someone in the company looks at that list regularly and knows where each entry comes from. A former rep’s laptop with work Viber still open is an open door to the base. More in client base security in messengers.

Business channel and live account — different roles

Viber has official tools for companies: business messages through platform partners, chatbots, business accounts. Next to them are reps’ ordinary accounts. Two different ways to talk to a client. Confusing them is expensive.

The official channel belongs to the company and never quits. It suits what repeats: notifications, statuses, reminders, answers to common questions. But it lives by its own rules. Business messaging is usually paid, needs the recipient’s consent and runs through partners. You can’t send anything to anyone through it.

A rep’s account is a live voice. A rep can send a voice note, clarify, persuade, work with a client for weeks. But that account is tied to a number and a phone and lives by ordinary user rules — including limits after complaints and spam-like behavior.

Decide what you give to the official channel and what to people. This is a decision about how the company talks to its clients. The sales leader makes it, not whoever sets it up later.

When a number gets limited

Limits in Viber are a fact of the market. A number that recipients complain about, or that behaves like a mass sender, loses the ability to write normally. How to run broadcasts so it doesn’t come to that is covered in Viber broadcast without bans. Here — what a limit means for the company.

What it looks like in practice. For a week a rep works as usual. Then says: “Messages aren’t going through.” A few days later it turns out some of their clients haven’t had a reply in a while. They don’t know what happened. They simply went to whoever answered.

Ask yourself and the team:

• How do you learn about a limit today — right away, or when the rep mentions it?
• How many clients know only this number and have no other way to find the company?
• Who picks up the conversation with them, and what will they hear so they don’t have to explain everything again?
• Who decides a number is taken out of work: the rep, the sales leader, or a procedure written in advance?

If there are no answers, a limited number takes its clients with it. A CRM for Viber starts with knowing in advance what happens when one number goes silent.

Rules, consent and law

Working with clients through Viber runs up against three lines. Assess them calmly:

• Platform rules. What Viber allows ordinary accounts and what it allows business tools. The rules change. Assign someone to follow them.
• Recipients’ consent. Which clients agreed to receive messages from you, and how you would prove it.
• Data law in your country. Client conversations are personal data. Where they are stored, who processes them and for how long all matter.

Decide which country your clients’ conversations may be stored in, who outside the company may see them, and what happens to the data if you change vendors. Put it in the contract. The final word on legality comes from your lawyer — not the vendor, not an article.

What to settle before choosing

A tool won’t fix what the company hasn’t settled. Order at home comes first:

• The numbers the team writes to clients from are in the company’s name
• Work phones and chat backups don’t live in personal clouds
• A rep leaving doesn’t take the number, the phone or the clients
• The company has a permanent number clients can find it by
• Client agreements don’t live only in one person’s head
• The company’s stance on deleted and disappearing messages is decided
• The team knows: no work conversations in hidden chats
• It’s clear who reads others’ conversations and who can take the whole base
• Someone regularly checks the computers linked to work accounts
• It’s decided what goes through the official business channel and what through people
• You know where client data may be stored, and a lawyer has seen the terms

Some risks can’t be left to a rep or a vendor: who owns the numbers, who owns the base and who closes access on the day someone leaves. The sales leader decides that. Everything else we discuss in person. Not in an article.

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A phone fits in a pocket. A client leaves in it only if the company let that happen.