Why Clariti is an essential group chat tool for the modern workplace

Whether you are working from the office or home, group chat certainly features among the latest must-have workplace essentials. Since most of the group chat tools are device and platform agnostic, no wonder it is growing in popularity. Whether you’re a small, medium or large enterprise, the power of group chat should not be underestimated as it offers an array of time- and money-saving solutions. According to a survey, during the lockdown last year, the adoption of group chat applications skyrocketed from 2.4% to a whopping 33.3% of workplaces.   

But all may not be well with group chats. If the group chat tools are not handled properly, they can create havoc for organizations. According to a study, 32% of workers avoid sharing documents through group chat because they’re too hard to find later. When employees collaborate from different geographies, they have to look through multiple messages to catch up with others. With unstructured group chats, employees are at risk of overlooking important information.

Why Clariti is an essential group chat tool for the modern workplace

Channels are noisy, but Clariti is not

Most of the group chat tools use channels that are rigid. Once a channel is created and group members added, all the group members see all the channel’s chats whether it pertains to them or not. As a result, users are overwhelmed reading a constant stream of messages peripherally related to their day-to-day work. This can get even more stressful as chat messages in channels can mix up many unrelated topics making it hard to understand the context of the discussion.  

When you use Clariti, you can start a group chat with multiple Clariti users on a specific topic. However, unlike channels Clariti group chats are not rigid. Group members can be added and removed on the fly. Consequently, group members only get chat alerts on issues in which they are actively participating. This avoids unwanted messages from multiple groups. So, you are not overloaded with too much unnecessary information.  

Channels miss the context, but Clariti doesn’t

When team members use channels to chat that have generalized topics, context gets lost and information gets buried. For instance, a channel may have the topic ‘Marketing’ but there may be many marketing projects going on at the same time. All the messages of these different marketing projects get clubbed in the same ‘marketing’ channel making it hard to sort out the history & relevance of each new chat. To avoid the stress that group chat creates, many team members resort to direct chat, which creates information silos and knowledge opacity. Besides, these tools only focus on chats but the information is shared in many other ways such as emails, online documents and social media among others. There is no way to bring active conversations from all these other forms in chat channels.  

Since Clariti allows you to chat from virtually any other mode of communication such as a group chat, an email, a cloud document etc, there is no need to worry about maintaining context when referring to those items in a chat. For instance, in Clariti, when you receive an email, you can immediately start chatting from the email and the recipient will understand the context that you are talking about – without you having to forward the email! You can save both the email and related chat in a TopicFolder preserving context for later referral. Using Clariti, you can seamlessly connect and store all the chats with other related communications including email, chat, cloud storage, social feeds, etc into one TopicFolder. That too, Clariti can do it automatically in real-time without your active intervention.  

Channels create silos, but Clariti does not  

Most modern chat tools allow users to create channels as needed. When users share files and documents over these channels, they create information silos. When all your communication remains in silos, referring to a specific conversation or files can be difficult as you will have to search in multiple channels or chat rooms within the same tool or remember all the information in memory to visualize the big picture.  

Silos are inevitable when you use separate apps for emails, chats, calls, to-dos, and cloud documents. Apart from just group chat, Clariti supports other team communication forms like email, shared documents, audio calls, social feeds, screen sharing, to-dos, etc. In Clariti conversations, emails, to-dos, and documents can be organized in folders called TopicFolders. TopicFolders eliminate time wasted in searching for information and make it very easy to see the big picture with one click.    

Replacing email with group chat  

Though email has been ruling the roost among business communication in the workplace, instantaneous group chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have changed how employees communicate at work. Many organizations around the world started replacing email with these new platforms. But the common grouse against these tools is you can get stuck in long and never-ending group chats that demand your attention 24/7. It puts pressure on you to be online & available all the time.  

Now the big question is: “Can swapping out email for group chat really increase overall productivity?”. Well, the answer is if group chat tools are used within an integrated system it would have a high success rate.  

Instead of replacing emails with chats, you need tools that can combine email with group chat for team communications. There are very few tools like Clariti that can do this. While Clariti doesn’t discourage people from using emails, it has made it unnecessary when communicating with other Clariti users. When you receive an email from someone who is not using Clariti, you can start chatting from the same email with other Clariti participants. This reduces email forwards and time wasted in copy-pasting content in chats. Besides, Clariti maintains the connection between the original email and subsequent chat thereby making it easy to reference the context of the discussion at any time. So, in Clariti, both email and group chat can co-exist without conflict or redundancy.  

Conclusion

Group chats are fast, but they are not suitable for detail-intensive messaging. Emails are more formal but they are not fast. To make the best of both worlds, you need a unified communication tool that can unify different modes of communication in your business and put them together in one application. With this tool, all your communication will be in one place, and you can switch back and forth between them seamlessly. To put it simply, it combines all the ways your business communicates: email, chat, call, social feeds, cloud storage, etc, and helps related conversations connect with each other to create a cohesive, unified system that increases productivity and effectiveness. It is a combined platform that makes your business communication easier and smoother.