Team chat

Team chat is for the people who work for you. It is not customer messaging, it does not text anybody outside the shop, and it is not waiting on any carrier approval — it is internal, so it just works.

The three kinds of conversation

• Channels for the whole shop or a part of it — the kind of thing that used to be a group text nobody could leave.
• Direct messages between two people.
• Job threads attached to a specific job, so the photo of the panel is on the panel job rather than in someone's camera roll.

There is always a #shop channel; you can add your own, up to twenty. A direct-message thread exists between you and each person on the shop. A job thread exists for every job, and the list only shows the jobs that have something in them until you ask to see the rest.

Why job threads are the point

A job thread lives with the job. Whoever picks that job up next gets the context without asking anyone: what the customer said on the phone, what was found on the first visit, the photo of the part number. That is the thing a group text cannot do, and it is the reason this is in the app rather than in somebody's phone.

Finding it

Team chat opens from the drawer in the header, from anywhere in the app, so reading a thread does not cost you the screen you were on. It is the same conversation as the full Team chat page — post in one and it is in the other.

Two honest limits

• It updates on refresh, not live. There is no push and no typing indicator. A new message appears the next time the screen loads, so this is a place to leave notes rather than to hold a conversation in real time.
• Everyone is posting from the shop's account. Because there is no separate team-member login yet, messages carry a Post as name rather than coming from a person's own sign-in. See Team members.