I dealt with this as well and totally agree. My rule for the project teams was to never join any chat or real-time communication solution outside of email with a client.<p>While I see the advantages of having a Slack or similar chat agent, I also see the informality that it allows and then it is easy to wind up with uncontrollable projects by getting requests that would never make it through a formal request process. This happens internally in companies all the time and in many cases it complicates projects immensely, but it is sold as a remedy to interrupting the engineers.<p>Most clients got it, some weren't totally happy about it, but they understood. Funniest part is usually their internal engineering staff (if they had one) 100% understood, and was just jealous.<p>My team did experiment with this quite a bit however, putting different people on chat with clients, but found that in almost any scenario it would sour the client relationship because someone would either feel ignored (responses weren't fast enough) or abused (way too much unnecessary chatter and/or off the book requests).