Level Up Team Chat with These Applications
Communication is the key to success for teams working on different projects. This is the only way to coordinate with each other, assign tasks, and follow up on concerns. But when your teammates can’t physically interact due to remote working arrangements, you need a tool that will bridge that distance by providing seamless, real-time communication. This is where team chat applications come in. The following are some of the best team chat apps available today:
Slack
Slack’s main draw is that it incorporates modern trends into its messaging platform. If you want to spice up your day-to-day communication with officemates and teammates, go ahead and add some of the craziest GIFs in your messages. Slack’s useful chatbots also help you interact, even when you’re away from your computer. It’s more about streamlining office communication, without taking the fun out of the actual interaction. If you thought that office or team chat apps are stiff, boring, and can’t substitute the actual physical act of talking with people, Slack can probably make you reconsider. Slack has all the standard features of a messaging platform, including the ability to create separate chat groups or “channels.” This helps you organize team conversations, to separate high-priority projects from ideation and brainstorming talks or just useless chatter. You can also send direct messages to anyone you want to talk to privately, or to a small group of participants, for focused group discussions.
Workplace by Facebook
If you think Facebook is the last thing you want to get work done through, think again. Workplace by Facebook revolutionizes the way we use the social network site by making it actually useful for work. Workplace leverages the fact that we are mostly on social media even at work, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Just like other collaborative platforms, Workplace enables you to connect your whole team under one roof, with all the right tools to help boost your business.
By now, you already know that Facebook has a robust messaging feature integrated in the site. Applying this to Workplace means you can reach any of your teammates instantly with just a simple message, or if you want, you can use it to make a voice call or video call.
If you’re feeling fancy and you want to share something that’s happening to your business right now, you can go live anytime with the Live Video feature. Be able to broadcast special events like product launches, talks by important guests, or product giveaways, all using the camera on your smartphone.
HipChat
No team chat list would be completed without Atlassian’s HipChat. Just as the name suggests, it is aimed to address the messaging needs of the modern employee. It comes packed with custom emoticons, GIFs, bots, as well as Twitter feeds. Their goal is to make work a bit more fun, so even when you’re chatting with teammates on a project, you can always spice up the conversation with a flashy new GIF or express your emotions through a wide range of updated emoticons.
But when it comes to work, HipChat can be pretty serious, too. When it was acquired by Atlassian, the messaging platform suddenly got serious productivity upgrades through a variety of integrations. You can add tools and services like JIRA, Trello, Bitbucket, and more. This way, you don’t have to leave the messaging platform in order to access work-related tools to get the job done.
Glip by RingCentral
Glip is another messaging platform that suddenly got upgraded when it was acquired by another successful company. From a simple messaging tool, it was suddenly transformed into a major teamwork and collaboration platform overnight. RingCentral’s aim was to use Glip to complete its communications package, in addition to offering virtual PBX and other cloud phone services. With a boatload of integrations available for users, Glip can be customized to fit your work.
Aside from the usual team chat features, users also get productivity and management tools within the messaging platform. As you chat with your team, you can create and complete tasks, fill up your schedule on the built-in calendar, and share files easily when you need to. With Glip’s integrated task management features, you can organize your workflow and drastically decrease email clutter, since you have all of these in just one collaboration platform.
