Connect with People Outside your Organization in Mio Universal Channels

Between the major team collaboration apps, it is estimated there are over 500 million users of Slack, Microsoft, and Cisco tools.

Within an organization, you rely on tools like Slack and Teams to chat together and collaborate in a productive manner.

And when your external business contacts use that same platform, you can utilize shared channels or guest access.

But what happens when you need to chat with people outside your organization that use a different team collaboration app?

That’s why we created Mio Universal Channels to improve intercompany collaboration.

Universal channels allow you to stay in one messaging tool and chat with your external business contacts as if they were a colleague.

By enabling clients, freelancers, and suppliers to chat in universal channels, everyone can collaborate together, share files, reply to threads, and edit messages — all from their tool of choice.

Universal Channels are officially available today to install for Microsoft Teams, Slack and Webex Teams.

What is a universal channel?

A universal channel is just like a Slack shared channel. You can message people outside your organization without leaving Slack.

The difference? You can also message people outside of Slack; like those who use Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex Teams.

You can also effortlessly chat with an unlimited number of customers, clients, and partners.

If you use Microsoft Teams, you stay in Microsoft Teams, invite contacts who use other apps to your universal channel, and you chat with them via their preferred platform.

The same for Webex Teams. You stay in Webex Teams, invite the outside party to your universal channel, and chat as you would with an internal colleague.

When connected to your external contacts, universal channels allows you to message cross-platform. And it’s not just simple messages that are included.

Universal channels support the following functionality to enable better intercompany collaboration:

• Basic messages
• Threaded messages
• File uploads
• Editing messages
• Deleting messages
• Emojis
• GIFs

Use cases for universal channels

Ultimately, universal channels are for everybody.

If you have an external contact who uses a different collaboration tool than the one you do, universal channels help you seamlessly chat without having to install another app and constantly switch between the two.

Codestream sells code collaboration software to technology companies that use a variety of messaging applications.

Codestream’s CEO, Peter Pezaris, says:

“Our sales and customer success teams use Slack shared channels whenever possible. Until discovering Mio, we were still using email to communicate with customers who use Teams. Mio allows us to communicate with all our customers in real-time, regardless of which team collaboration app they use.”

We’ve highlighted some more typical use cases below:

Marketing

• You chat with different freelancers every day to create campaigns. Each of those has q preferred chat tool but you only have Microsoft Teams. Instead of staying in Teams, you resort to emailing each freelancer which takes twice the time to agree rates and project outcomes.
• With universal channels, you could agree project rates, goals, and outcomes in real-time, bounce ideas off each other, and hit KPIs sooner.

Sales

• You chat with prospects every day. Instead of staying in Slack, you chase emails and arrange meetings, eventually losing clients due to a clunky comms experience.
• With universal channels, you could increase deal close rate, improve win rate velocity, and reduce churn.

Customer Success

• You chat with customers every day. Instead of getting them onboarded and growing the account, you juggle other apps and miss notifications.
• With universal channels, you could accelerate onboarding, get repeat business, and be more proactive.

IT

• You chat with every department in the organization. Instead of having a single platform, you implement governance plans to cover recurring shadow IT and create new accounts across multiple platforms.
• With universal channels, you could scrap guest account administration for good, manage team collaboration apps the way you want to, and reduce shadow IT.

Installing your first universal channel

To get started, you just need to install the Mio Universal Channels app on the platform of your choice.

You can install Mio by clicking here or by searching for Mio Universal Channels in the app directory of your preferred chat platform.

You will be asked to choose your current chat platform and follow the install flow.

Once installed, send your unique channel URL to any contacts you wish to invite into the channel.

When your contacts join your universal channel, you can start to chat cross-company and cross-platform!

Let us know what you think

Once you’ve installed your first universal channel, share your feedback by sending us a message or tweeting us @mio