Unable to add external contacts to Channels

What can we do? Can we start complaint procedure when the customer service is not helping?

I also have this problem. Hopefully Zoom will fix it soon. Otherwise I won't be able to use Zoom anymore

Same problem. Can tell you that it was released in the September 18th release and that a rollback won't fix it. Support keeps telling us that nothing is wrong, but whatever this is, is causing us a huge headache.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/13836402647693-Release-notes-for-Zoom-Team-Chat

It’s listed 4th under New and Enhanced Features for windows and macos only.

• Consent required for channel and group chat additions Windows, macOS
  Users will be presented with a consent notice before being added to an external channel or group chat. Adding external users to channels and group chats no longer requires contact requests. However, contact request approvals are still needed for one-on-one chats. This feature will not be immediately available, as it is dependent on a backend release, currently scheduled for September 24, 2023.

Sorry to hear everyone else is also going through the same issues. I have been emailing to Zoom customer service throughout the week and wanted to wait to see if there was a solution on their end before saying anything. However I have been hugely disappointed with no real solution given to my issue.

It seems like the update was catered towards new users and not at loyal customers like us all who have found these issues. I'm also worried about the apparent missing tabs and options to manage the contacts privileges (which I did not know about before).

The one workaround I have found is using the mobile app. When inviting contacts from the channel it has an option to invite to Chat via link. Even this has problems as it doesn't let you directly message a contact on zoom. Long story short, after multiple experiments I found the easiest way to get contacts into the channel was to copy invite link and manually paste and send it to the contacts who wanted to join that specific channel. They would then click on the link and a approval request would show on the channel for me to approve.  

This is a very long winded approach and manual approach that ONLY works from your mobile phone app and I have been unable to do the same on the desktop client. When copying the channel link from the channels more menu option and trying the same thing it would say that the channel didn't exist/unable to join message to my contacts.   

I am more than happy to work with others when raising this as a complaint as it has affected the running of my business and has caused undue stress with the amount of time being wasted. It also makes us look extremely unprofessional to clients which is not what you expect with a paid service.  

TFFTutors, thanks for the solution! It works!

It works!! Thank you!! At least we can work with this solution until it gets fixed by the Zoom team...  

I've reported the problem twice but no response so far. They don't seem to be even aware of the problem but it's a major F-Up and if they don't fix it soon they will definitely lose some paying customers - me for example.

Finally, the good news is we can add external contacts to the channels.

Now external contacts get emails from Zoom and they need to accept them.

I managed to add a few external contacts to a channel yesterday.