If your business works with people outside your own team, vendors placing orders, clients awaiting updates, distributors coordinating stock, you have probably wished there was a faster way to reach them than email. Zoho Cliq addresses this with the concept of external users, and this article explains what that means and how the feature is structured.
In Zoho Cliq, an external user is simply someone who does not belong to your own Cliq organisation. This typically covers vendors, clients, distributors, contractors and any other third party you deal with regularly but who sits outside your company's internal directory. Because these people are not part of your organisation, Cliq treats conversations with them differently from conversations with your own colleagues, and it gives administrators a way to control whether this kind of contact is even allowed.
Email remains the default for most external correspondence, but it is slow for anything that needs a quick back-and-forth. A logistics team chasing a delivery update, an account manager checking a detail with a client, or a project lead syncing with a contractor all benefit from a chat-style exchange rather than a thread of formal messages. Bringing that conversation into Cliq also means it sits alongside your internal chats, so context is not scattered across two separate tools.
You can add an external person as a contact by supplying their email address, and once they accept the invitation, a direct chat becomes available. This is the closest equivalent to sending someone an instant message rather than an email.
External contacts can also be brought into group chats alongside your own colleagues. Interestingly, a group chat can include external users from more than one outside organisation at once, which is useful when a project involves several third parties at the same time.
For more structured, ongoing collaboration, Cliq also supports external channels. These let you invite people from another organisation into a shared channel where roles and permissions can be moderated, making them better suited to longer-running projects than a one-off chat.
Taken together, these three options give a business a reasonably flexible way to move external conversations out of the inbox and into a faster, more traceable chat environment, provided the right permissions are switched on first.