During the pandemic, many of us participated in numerous Zoom calls. However, you may not be aware that Zoom also offers Zoom Chat, a somewhat comparable service to Microsoft Teams and Slack. Along witseveralof other valuable updates for the collaboration software, Zoom announced on Monday a minor name change for the product. It is now known as Zoom Team Chat.
First, let’s talk about the name change. Because customers were unclear about the distinction between the chat you can use in Zoom meetings and the separate communication suite, Zoom has added “Team.”
According to the head of product at Zoom Team Chat, Sharvari Nerurkar, changing the product’s name “helps make the distinction that it is a full collaborative hub product”
Zoom Team Chat is designed to be a single hub for collaboration where you can communicate with coworkers asynchronously via text chat or in real-time via calls. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably already used a combination of voice, text, and video to communicate with your coworkers, albeit through various pieces of software. (At The Verge, we frequently communicate via Slack while holding video calls via Zoom.)
If your company uses Zoom for video calls, you could theoretically use Zoom Team Chat to conduct most of your office communications without switching between different apps. To collaborate with the same group of people, “our customers are telling us that [they] do not want the friction of jumping to multiple different products,” said Nerurkar.
