The deal happens on WhatsApp. It shouldn't die there.
With hundreds of millions of users in India, WhatsApp is not a channel you migrate teams off — it is where your customer already is. The mistake is letting it be the only place the conversation exists.
Every implementation we run in India starts with the same discovery. Someone opens their phone, scrolls through a group called "Dispatch — urgent", and that is where the business actually happens. Prices are agreed there. Delivery dates change there. Complaints arrive there at nine at night.
The instinct of most CRM projects is to fight this. Ban the groups, mandate the app, run a training session. It fails within a fortnight, because the customer never agreed to any of it — and the customer is the one who chose the channel.
You cannot win an argument with the channel your customer already prefers.
What actually goes wrong
The problem is not the chat. It is that chat has no owner, no state and no memory. A message asking for a revised rate looks identical whether it was answered or not. Nobody can tell from a group thread whether the order was dispatched, and when the salesperson who agreed the discount leaves, the reason leaves with them.
Absorb the channel instead
The teams who get this right keep chat as the front door and make one rule: nothing stays only in chat. A rate agreed becomes a quote on the record. A delivery promise becomes an order line with a date. A complaint becomes a ticket with an owner and a clock, even if the whole conversation continues in the thread.
Done properly, the customer notices no change at all — which is the point. Their experience is the same fast, informal channel. Yours is a record that can answer questions after the person who made the promise has gone home.
The one habit worth enforcing
If you change nothing else, change this: whoever makes a commitment in chat writes it to the record before the end of the day. Not a summary — the actual quote, order or ticket. It takes under a minute now that the AI can draft it from the conversation, and it is the difference between a business that remembers and a business that relies on whoever happened to be in the group.