Imagine you have a question for another person at your company perhaps located across town or across the country. Whether your small business has a staff of 5 or 50, maintaining a phone list and going through the hassle of calling people constantly may not be the easiest solution. Another solution is to use a simple instant messaging system that brings your team together, allowing you to communicate quickly and efficiently. That’s where Cotap comes in.
Think of Cotap as a business version of WhatsApp, the popular social messaging platform recently acquired by Facebook. With WhatsApp, you need the person’s phone number to send them a message. But with Cotap, all you need is your business credentials, which connects to the company directory. Find the person in your company you want to send a message to, and it’s done. No looking for email addresses or phone numbers. Just look up the name and flash them a quick message.
Cotap combines a variety of mobile communications services including several tiers of paid options. The $5 per person per month plan has some features related to geolocation. It will help companies to track how their employees are communicating and from where. Location-based alerts are another feature the company is planning to introduce soon.
Co-founder Jim Patterson told Fox Business News Center recently:
“We are getting a lot of traction from companies that have a larger percentage of their workforce without desktop computers. One of the companies we work with is Hyatt, who is pushing it out to their hotel managers, who use it to coordinate their day-to-day activities. Email and desktop don’t really work for them, and they had previously been using walkie-talkies, so this is quieter.”
If you upgrade to the $10 per member per month plan, one of the most interesting features is remote wipe. This is for when an employee suddenly leaves the company and has company information on their Cotap phone installation. (The phone stores all the employee conversations on the company servers).
To protect itself, your company can do a remote wipe, and all of the information will instantly disappear from that former employee’s phone. This security feature is especially invaluable if you deal with a lot of sensitive information, with which a disgruntled former employee could do damage.
The company can also send out company-wide alerts via Cotap, which Patterson compared to an Amber alert.
But another benefit of Cotap, the company claims, is that you are able to keep personal and work information completely separate. In an era of security concerns, including worries about business data being accidentally lost or shared, this is likely to be a popular feature.
Image: Cotap
Aira Bongco
Oooh we need something like this. In our business, we tend to call each other manually and it can get tiring overtime. Group messaging will really make it easier. I’ll try this out.
Mark O'Neill
What is your business? Let us know about your experience with Cotap if you decide to use it.
Bill Thompson
My team has been using Glip.com for the last 6 months, its a lot like Cotap seems to be . . but has a ton of collaboration tools like task management, video chat and calendar. And . . it’s free.