OmniChat vs Slack

With numerous chatting apps reaching their milestones and billions daily, and even more of them arising every day, some might not see OmniChat capability. Especially with having powerful collaboration platforms such as Slack and Teams taking almost every potential user worldwide.

To show you that OmniChat is not another chatting app trying to get famous fast, and, to be precise, it’s not a chat app at all; we are comparing it to everyone well known Slack.

Still, this is not an article about which product is better, yet about how both OmniChat and Slack can be connected to Jira, have different advantages, and still be used together. 

Slack is presented as “a new way to communicate - faster than email and more focused than chat”. As a channel-based messaging platform, Slack enables direct and group messaging as well as file sharing. By sharing a channel in Slack, you can keep clients, vendors or partners in the loop.

Launched back in 2014, Slack now has 12 million active users daily. A substantial change for Slack was back in 2018 when Atlassian and Slack joined forces. As pointed out in TechCrunch last August: “Over the course of the last two years, Slack and Atlassian shipped 11 product integrations, which now see about a million active users every month, with Jira being the most often used integration”.

You can read more about Atlassian and Slack partnership here.

Most business tools, like Jira, Halp, Zapier and Google Drive, are integrated into Slack. There are over 2,000 apps and 750 bots on the Slack App Directory.

So, the question pops out again: why would you use OmniChat when Slack has all of this? To answer that question, let us explain what OmniChat does. 

OmniChat for Jira Service Management is cross-channel support for customers that enables two-way communication via WhatsApp and SMS. It gives customers an option to choose a chat app, making the communication easy for them, while it stays the same, on a single interface for agents. 

Communication from Jira Service Management to customers and vice versa is done via OmniChat through any channel.

Although most companies have rules for communicating with users only via email or Teams, the integration of OmniChat gives users freedom of choice.

While Slack improves internal communication between teams and individuals, OmniChat goes beyond the building and strengthens communication between customers/clients and companies.

As Jonathan Ryan, Infobip’s regional manager, said: “Slack is a very good tool, but has a very specific kind of audience, look, feel, and interaction capability with it. It doesn’t reach everybody the same way as an SMS or WhatsApp message.”

In the end, it’s about what your customers want, not you. According to Incite Group, over 50% of companies report their most critical customer experience issue as being “providing a seamless experience across multiple channels.”

Ryan added that an issue with using an over the top messaging service is that you can have failover. "If you initiated a conversation originally via WhatsApp flow and there is a, for some reason, degradation in service due to the loss of data capability or issue with the service due to the network, you still can deliver an SMS message.” 

To conclude…

Slack is an excellent channel for your company communication. It is faster and more organized than email, keeps everyone in the loop and on the whole team same page. Slack definitely helps you get work done. Internally.

OmniChat, on the other hand, connects communication channels with JSM and  customers with companies. OmniChat simplifies work. Externally.

At Atlassian Community Event Sydney, we discussed integrating popular chat apps with Jira Service Management. If you want to know more about OmniChat’s advantage over Slack, watch the webinar on the video below.