Connecteam's Chat is your central communication hub, making it easy to stay connected with your users across the organization. Users can instantly share messages, media, and files, and because Chat is connected to many features throughout the platform, you can start conversations wherever work happens.

Chat is available on both mobile and desktop for admins and users. With Chat, you can create one-on-one conversations, group conversations, and broadcast messages. Admins can also control who users can communicate with and which chat actions they can perform.

To activate the chat enter the launchpad, go to the left sidebar, to the Company Chat feature, and activate the chat.

Now that Chat is activated, let's look at the different types of conversations you can create.

To start a new conversation, select the Add New button and choose the relevant option.

There are two types of conversations you can create:

A New Chat is a one-on-one conversation between you and another user or admin.

Use individual chats to quickly share information, ask questions, or clarify details with a specific person. Both participants can send messages, files, images, and other content.

Groups allow you to communicate with multiple users in a single conversation.

When creating a group, you'll add the group details and assign members using either Smart Groups or Selected Users.

In the Group Details page, you can choose whether to enable Allow members to send messages.

If member messaging is disabled, an additional setting called Show admins as anonymous will appear. Enable this option if you'd like admin messages to be posted anonymously.

Broadcast Message A broadcast message lets you send the same message to multiple people privately, across both Chat and Helpdesk on mobile and desktop. Each recipient receives it as an individual, private conversation, just like a regular direct message, without visibility into who else received it. When choosing recipients, you can now select people by their real-time work status instead of picking each user manually.

This is ideal for time-sensitive, operational messages, letting you instantly reach exactly the right audience:

Currently working — everyone clocked in right now.

Running late — employees who haven’t clocked in for a shift that has already started.

When creating a Group, you can add a group name and description. Within the description, you can attach shortcuts, images, and files that will remain available to anyone assigned to the group.

The description appears at the top of the conversation for all members, providing immediate context about the group's purpose and helping users understand the type of conversation they're participating in.

The description will appear at the top of the chat for all users to see, allowing your user's to see whether it’s a team channel, group conversation, or app-generated thread, and immediately see the purpose and context of that space.

As mentioned above, Groups can be assigned either to Selected Users or Smart Groups. Let's review when to use each option.

If you want to create a group for an existing team, such as cooks, waiters, or managers, assigning the group to Smart Groups is the best option.

Using Smart Groups ensures the group is automatically available to all current and future users who match the group's rules. If a user is added to or removed from the Smart Group, their group membership updates automatically as well.

If the people you want to include are not part of an existing Smart Group, use the Selected Users option.

This allows you to manually choose exactly which users should be included in the group.

Now that you have learned how to create chats let's talk about how to start a chat from anywhere in the platform. At the top of the screen, the chat icon can always be seen from anywhere inside the platform.

Simply click on it and the chat will open on the right.

Additionally, in all other features such as the Job Schedule, Time Clock, Quick Tasks, and more, you can select the relevant users and create either a team chat or individual chat from the Actions Tab. In the example below I create a team chat with three selected users from inside the Today Tab in the Time Clock Feature.

We know how important it is to understand whether or not your users read the message you sent and for this reason we allow you to know both in an individual chat and in a team chat or channel if your message was read.

In an individual chat, two check marks mean that a message has been read. Below you can see how this looks.

In team chats, to see who read your message simply click on the check mark on the right side of the message. This will display a list detailing who has read your message and who hasn't.

💡 Tip: In the mobile app, you can also access this information. Just click on the check mark on the right.

You can reply to a specific message in any conversation — a private chat or a Group.

On desktop: hover over the message, click the arrow icon next to it, and select Reply (or double-click the arrow icon next to the message).

On the mobile app:

Your reply will be linked to the original message so everyone can follow the context.

Yes — you can star messages in order to “pin” them and find them quickly later (Admins only).

When a message contains something worth saving (like key details, a decision, or a reminder), an Admin can star it. Starred messages are collected in the conversation info view, so you can revisit what you marked without scrolling through the entire conversation.

Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question.