WhatsApp, email, phone, text and web chat, all landing in one place, usually Xelion or Zoho Bigin, instead of scattered across five apps and three people's pockets. The thing most small businesses need but nobody's quite sold them yet.
A typical customer pings on WhatsApp in the morning, emails an attachment in the afternoon, and calls the office number at 5pm. Three threads, three apps, three people who each see one slice. Things get missed.
Customers love it because it feels casual. Your team hates it because it lives on whoever's mobile happened to answer. We bring WhatsApp Business into a shared inbox the whole team can see.
Generic info@ / sales@ / support@ addresses unified with personal mailboxes. Threads visible to the team, auto-assigned, replied to from one place.
Phone calls (via our office phones service) and texts land alongside the written messages. Call recordings attach to the right customer; missed calls become follow-ups.
Website enquiries and live chat widgets route into the same inbox. No more "did anyone reply to the form?" hunts on a Monday morning.
Your customers already have WhatsApp on their phones, so let them use it. We set it up so messages reach your team, not one person.
Where everything lands is your choice. WhatsApp needs Xelion or Zoho Bigin; Microsoft Teams can handle email, calls and chat, but it doesn't take WhatsApp.
Shared email, calls and team chat in the Teams your staff already use. Teams doesn't take WhatsApp, so if WhatsApp matters to you, pick Xelion or Bigin instead, or run Xelion alongside Teams.
The same messages, but attached to your customer records. Every conversation tied to a contact and a deal. Right answer if sales is the goal and you want to see every touchpoint.
If you've got our Xelion phone system, your calls, WhatsApp and messages can all land there too, next to live call screens and your customer records. Right answer for sales teams and anyone who lives on the phone.
| XelionWhat we recommend | Zoho BiginFor sales teams | Microsoft TeamsIf you live in Teams | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business phone calls | Yes, it's a phone system | Logs calls from Xelion or another phone system | With Teams calling |
| Yes, add-on | Yes | No | |
| Stays in Outlook (syncs contacts & calendar) | Yes | Through Outlook | |
| Team chat | Yes, built-in messaging | Basic | Yes, it's what Teams does best |
| Customer records | Pops up the caller from your CRM | Yes, it's a CRM | Bigin pipeline in a Teams tab |
| AI receptionist | Yes, add-on (Xeli) | No | No |
| Live call dashboard | Yes, wallboards included | No | Basic queue stats, needs Teams Premium (extra cost) |
| From | £26 per user / month | Zoho licence + our setup | £23 per user / month |
The Xelion app sits inside Teams. Your staff can search contacts, make calls, see call history and recordings, and sign on or off their lines without leaving Teams. Busy/free status syncs both ways, and everyone logs in with their Microsoft account. The full softphone still runs as the Xelion app on the computer.
Calls go through Xelion and log themselves against the customer in Bigin. The caller pops up when the phone rings, and you can click to dial from a Bigin record. It's a paid connector, priced up front.
It's really just the CRM inside Teams. You can view and update your Bigin pipeline in a Teams tab, share a record into a chat, and start Teams meetings from Bigin. Teams doesn't pass calls or messages into Bigin.
Phone prices include UK calls, 12-month contract, plus VAT. WhatsApp in Xelion is £450 to install, waived for 10+ users. Xeli is £400 to set up, then £20 a month. See all our prices →
We see this conversation most often from customer-facing businesses, sales teams, service desks and support teams, anyone where missing a message costs real money.
Your busiest customer messages your most senior person on WhatsApp. When she's off, those threads are invisible to everyone else. That's a continuity risk.
Customers love sending a quick WhatsApp with a photo of the fault. But if it goes to one engineer's mobile, nobody else sees it, it isn't logged, and when they're on a job or off sick, the customer waits. One business WhatsApp number for the whole desk fixes that.
Your sales@ inbox has five people checking it, three people not, and a dozen "wait, did anyone reply?" moments a week.
A lead emails, then phones, then forms, and the salesperson picking it up has none of the previous context. Looks unprofessional, costs deals.
You're in a regulated field (finance, healthcare, legal) and need a proper record of customer conversations. Personal WhatsApp doesn't cut it.
WhatsApp's business approval is the slowest part (usually 1–2 weeks from Meta, WhatsApp's owner). Everything else moves quickly.
Which channels actually carry conversations today? Where do they live? Who currently checks them?
Xelion, Bigin or Teams. We help you decide, with a working demo to compare. If WhatsApp is a must, it's Xelion or Bigin.
WhatsApp connected, mailboxes connected, phones plugged in, rules written for who gets what, and a training session for the team.
Two weeks of "this auto-reply is too keen / that channel should go to a different person" tweaks based on real usage.
A monthly fee per person for the platform, plus a one-off setup project covering approvals, connections and training. WhatsApp itself charges a small fee for some conversations, which we pass through at cost.
We had three salespeople, each running their own WhatsApp on their own mobile. Now it's one inbox the whole team can see. We've stopped losing leads in the gap between people.
The two we get asked most: "can we still use WhatsApp like normal?" and "what does Meta charge?"
The Unified Inbox sits on top of two other services it works best alongside. Worth a look at both.
A 30-minute call. Tell us where conversations currently live and we'll show you what unification would look like.
Changing provider sounds like hassle. It isn't, we handle the whole move so you barely notice it happening.
