"Flock envisions a user base of one million in the next year" - Ninad Raval

DQ Channels interacts with Ninad Raval, Director of Product and Design of Flock, team communication and collaboration app. Ninad has helped several businesses to design simple multi-screen, data-driven products with a focus on bridging user goals and business objectives.

Tell us more about the newly launched ‘Teams on Flock’ and ‘Mailcast’ features

Flock can now be used by a wide range of Teams, including your entire company, your project, or external communities. Users, today, are a part of numerous teams and conversations that aren’t limited to their organization. This includes communities, side projects, and interest groups. With Teams on Flock, we bring the power of Flock to almost all avenues of user communication. Users can create multiple teams, each serving a specific purpose, and stay connected to all of them, by simply using Flock.

Mailcast is an app that integrates mailing list functionality directly into Flock. With Mailcast, every group created on Flock is automatically converted to an email list, making group mailing convenient and hassle-free. Flock is the first and only team messaging app to provide this functionality to its users.

How can team messengers change the way teams work

‘Teams’ in a modern workplace demands communication beyond the organization. An employee in a workplace may be part of various teams that may include his organization, clients, industry peers, and influencers. A Team Messenger like Flock empowers users with the possibility to stay connected, constantly exchange information and ideas with various Teams on a single platform.

The change in the workplace culture has been instrumental in introducing the ‘teams’ feature within a business messenger app.

Some key features about Flock Teams

• Teams on Flock are not restricted to a company domain. Any user can create a Flock Team using either a company or a free domain email (eg. Gmail)
• Every Team gets its own personalized Team URL, which makes it easy for people to invite, discover and join the Team
• Users can simultaneously be a part of multiple Teams, with a single account on Flock
• To keep conversations focused and relevant, users can create groups for projects or common interests.
• Teams are supported across all platforms - Desktop (Windows and Mac), Web and Mobile (iOS and Android)

How does team messengers bridge the gap between employee communication and WhatsApp communication (in terms of security and collaboration)

WhatsApp is great for personal messaging; however, it is not suitable for team collaboration and communication, where the ultimate objective is to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Coming to security aspects, Flock is a lot more secure as compared to WhatsApp. Flock provides for strict controls required by large organizations as well as relaxed permissions that are necessary for community driven Teams. Team Admins can easily configure these settings from the Team Admin Panel. For example, admins can decide how new members can find and join their Teams. Upgrading to an Organization Team allows users with the company email (or any other specified domain), to be added automatically, without any admin approvals. However, in Invite-only Teams, admins have to approve each member before they can join. Admins can manage file sharing permissions for users, file types, and file size.

Tell us about Team messenger and how it works well for all industries?

As indicated earlier, Flock can be used by a wide range of Teams, including your entire company, your project, or external communities. Flock stands relevant for all industries and functions. In India, we have clients from healthcare, e-commerce, BFSI and education, among others.

One factor that sets you apart from your competitors- Biggest one being Slack?

Flock is slicker and richer: Flock lets you easily switch between teams, conversations, apps and much more. In contrast, Slack’s UI feels clunky, crowded and complex. One can get a richer, more integrated experience with Flock Apps, which blend seamlessly with the core product, unlike Slack integrations which are mostly limited to bots and notifications.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDDapdpgCd8

Team messengers being a direct competitor to emails, your take on that?

Emails are slow, asynchronous and cumbersome. Many situations require quicker interaction and faster turnaround time. Flock solves this problem by providing an easy, feature rich product for teams and workplaces to seamlessly chat in a one-to-one or a group setting, thereby eliminating delays in responses.

Having said that, email is still relevant for communication addressed to a large work audience. Hence, that is the sole reason we introduced Mailcast App, to provide group mailing functionality within a team messenger.

What are your Future expansion plans?

We are targeting to increase our user base to one million in the next one year.