Pre and post meeting chat with our customers is a poor experience (ie. for regular private meetings)

NOTE: this post is not about Channel meetings. instead it refers to regular private meetings

eg. I'm running a workshop with customer ABC, and I invite 10 people from customer ABC to the private meeting

With our customer engagements we were hoping to move away from email for pre and post meeting chat, but looks like email it is until the Teams meeting experience improves.

Pre-meeting chat

1. Our customers cannot access the pre-meeting chat (only us internal people can)

- this is a downer as we were hoping to hype up the pending meeting with a chat, polls, and some pre-reading materials with our customers

Not sure if this will change soon with the pending roadmap item of enabling/disabling pre, during, post meeting chat - I haven't been able to find how this will have an impact on non-internal people eg customers as meeting participants

Post-meeting chat

1. some customers have trouble accessing post-meeting chat, others don't (we are not sure why)

For an techies in this forum you may have quick knowledge on why this happens - I'd be happy to know 😉

2. some workshop customer participants who were invited but did not join the meeting (they may have not responded, or responded tentative or declined) need to know about next steps, yet when I try to add them as a participant to that chat it won't work (in this case I have to start a 1:1 chat with them to give them the next steps individually, which is a hassle)

Note: I can add an internal person to the post-meeting chat who was not invited nor joined the meeting

3. we all know this one - when a customer clicks the stream recording they are denied access (not sure why it's not greyed out for them to prevent this bad experience)

4. if I share homework documents with the workshop participants in the chat, again they are denied access (the design does not inform me that "your meeting guests will not be able to access these files, are you sure you still want to post them")

So for both points 3 and 4 I avoid the file sharing feature and instead I send them a OneDrive link in the chat

5. customers who joined the meeting via someone giving them the link, rather than them being directly invited or fwded the invite will not be able to access the post meeting chat - I just noted this here for completion, but this is not a problem for us as we use invites or fwd invites...but yes we can't help unexpected drop-ins who were given a link

In all we will revisit this when the experience is friction-free for non-internal meeting participants (eg customers)

PS - at the moment I'm running a workshop with a customer on "how to use Teams to run workshops" - and at the moment my recommendation is for the pre and post meeting chat to be done in email - and to use Teams for only the delivery itself.

Love to hear your experiences in Teams being an end-to-end workshop meeting experience with customers