Zoom Team Chat vs. In-Meeting Chat: Enhance Productivity and Collaboration

Instant messaging, otherwise known as chat, has become one of the most popular tools for organizations as it offers a fast, effective, and flexible method of communication that enhances productivity and streamlines workflows. The Zoom platform provides leading communication solutions such as chat, team collaboration, video meetings, phone, and video webinars, all conveniently located within the Zoom desktop and mobile apps.

Many of you are probably familiar with in-meetings and webinar chat, but do you know all the ways you can further collaborate before, during, and after a video meeting with Zoom? Learn more about how you can collaborate with internal and external users, share files, links, and more using Zoom.

While both are messaging solutions that enable users to communicate via instant messaging, Zoom Team Chat and in-meeting chat serve two different purposes. Zoom Team Chat enables you to persistently message and collaborate with internal and external contacts from the Zoom desktop and mobile apps at any time, while in-meeting chat provides another way to collaborate with participants during a meeting.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the differences between these solutions and how you can use them to enhance productivity.

Zoom Team Chat is where work happens outside of meetings and phone calls. It’s a team collaboration tool that keeps information flowing and makes it easy to collaborate with anyone from anywhere with features like direct and group messaging, channels for teams and projects, and file sharing. 

Located in the Zoom desktop app, also known as the client, alongside Zoom Meetings and Zoom Phone, Zoom Team Chat is available for all free and paid users. To get started, simply search for your desired contact or channel using the search bar at the top of the desktop or mobile app, and instantly start collaborating.

Here are a few other ways you can use Zoom Team Chat to streamline your workflows: 

• Share important resources - Send files, pictures, screenshots, and other media via chat to quickly provide team members with critical resources and for easy collaboration. 

• Instantly elevate your conversation to a meeting or phone call - Start an ad-hoc video meeting or phone call directly from your chat with another user by clicking on the camera icon or the phone icon respectively. 

• Inject some fun into your workday - Send emojis and GIFs to your contacts to add some humor and personality to your workspace conversations!

• Always see who’s available to chat - With presence indicators, you can always see if your contacts are available or busy, allowing you to streamline the communication process and more reliably connect with others. If they’re currently busy, right-click on their name and have Zoom notify you once they’re available.

For more tips and tricks see our blog post, Best Practices for Using Chat in Your Organization.

In-meeting chat is only available within your Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinar, giving you the ability to message all participants in the session or send private messages to individual participants. 

Here are a few other ways you can use in-meeting chat to get more done together: 

• Provide fast, frictionless feedback - In-meeting chat is an excellent tool for providing critical feedback to presenters or participants in the meeting so you don’t have to interrupt whoever is speaking or create a side conversation via email or chat and hope they see it.

• Create opportunities for engagement during webinars - In-meeting chat is an excellent tool for engaging with those who attend your webinars, allowing you to create genuine interactions with attendees without interrupting the event. 

• Enhance the flow of your meeting - You can also use in-meeting chat to share important information and resources in your meeting without breaking the flow of the session, such as sharing links to websites, files that are being reviewed, or other important information.

• Create a space for sharing thoughts and questions - In-meeting chat is also useful to quickly gain feedback from your meeting participants without them talking over one another or delaying the conversation — simply ask them to post their thoughts or questions to in-meeting chat and you can address them immediately or wait until the end of your meeting. 

For more information about Zoom Team Chat, please check out our Zoom Team Chat support resources, and to learn more about in-meeting chat, please visit our support page. And be sure to download the Zoom client for access to Zoom Team Chat and other industry-leading solutions on the Zoom platform!