We have eliminated any type of communication —an environment for a non-competitive work of retailers inside Bitrix24

Any business information might be of an interest for your competitors; this is a simple notion that does not have anything to do with conspiracy theories or paranoia. Moreover, if your business has something to do with retail and a huge number of individual counterparties who cooperate with you, but compete with each other. In this case, the software should have flexible tools in order to organize internal work processes in such a way that everyone is able to collaborate, but not interfere with each other, and most importantly, you, as the owner of this business. Bitrix24 in the basic configuration is capable of many processes, but the tools here, on the contrary, are aimed at a close cooperation of all participants in the workflow. Fortunately, in the hands of experienced developers, such as the Avivi team, and with the boxed edition, all the necessary conditions can be created specifically for your business. 

Why is it not feasible to prohibit communication?

In fact, there are a lot of requests from customers about limiting the ability to communicate in Bitrix24: someone worries about the safety of information, the most strict managers want to reduce their employees' time for personal correspondence in convenient private or group chats — there are different requests. However, it should be noted, that Bitrix24 has been originally designed to improve communication, and is therefore equipped with a variety of featuresfor all currently possible methods of virtual communication: correspondence, exchange of audio messages, video conferencing hosting up to 48 participants. 

All this is available in various options: one-on-one, in projects chats, groups and tasks, in leads or deals discussions. Finally, there is a general chat of the company, the access to which is provided for each user of the system by default, as well as messages in the news feed, which can be displayed both to all and selected groups of users. Of course, it is possible to establish a social circle for third parties. For example, the participants in a closed project or group will only be able to communicate with each other. But generally there is no “prohibit communication” switch, as this contradicts the goals and objectives of Bitrix24. 

Customized limitations in a real-life example 

But if the customer requests it - they get it. Our customers from Hong Kong are developing a successful retail business and have chosen Bitrix24 as the main set of tools to create a corporate portal for the company. We received a task to customize Bitrix24 in a special way to prevent the company's employees from communicating with retailers and sales agents among themselves. It is impossible to achieve something like this in the Bitrix24 cloud service, but such a scenario is quite available in the box edition. 

We cannot disclose our client's business processes, but the general model of the project is not a trade secret. From a technical point of view, almost everything narrows down to customizing one of the components, which in Bitrix24 is responsible for communication and various notifications. Now the main task for the administrator of the Customer Portal is to define a new invitee to the corresponding working group — for each of them there are different rules regarding communication.

The most stringent conditions in this regard are for retailers, the sales agents who use the Portal to conclude transactions with the clients. For each one of them, only a small, but important part of the Portal remained with the usual interface: CRM, Tasks and News Feed. Through the latter, the user learns all the necessary information from the company's management, but is not able to leave comments accessible to everyone or write anything themselves. 

The interface of the user has also undergone changes: icons of notifications and profiles of other users, so recognizable in Bitrix24, have disappeared from the right menu. Thus, it is impossible to contact anyone or even simply see other participants in the workflow: ideal conditions for maintaining a non-competitive environment.

Opportunities for the other group members

Of course, not all users have been imposed with such a prohibition. Staff members have the opportunity to freely communicate with each other, use chats and other communication benefits of Bitrix24. However, it is no longer possible to contact the retailer or even see any of the sales agents within the structure of the company. Administrators exclusively are the ones able to see the full picture of the company's current activities. However, upon customer request, they can only send messages to the News Feed of retailers, without anticipating any feedback. 

Whatever the client's requests are, they are quite achievable with the boxed version of Bitrix24 and experienced Avivi developers. And the case with foreign customers proves that Bitrix24 is the excellent set of tools to organize the work of any company and the trading one, in particular.