Chat is the one place where every conversation with your drivers and your office staff lives side by side. The left sidebar is your whole inbox: a search box, filter pills for All, Unread, Drivers, and Admins, a compose button, and the conversation list grouped into sections.
What your company starts with
When chat is turned on for your company, a few things are created for you automatically.
The All Company channel is the company-wide announcement channel. Every admin and every active driver is a member automatically. By default only admins can post — drivers read the channel rather than reply into it. Chat admins can change that one setting from the channel's About tab: open All Company, open the info pane, choose Posting, and save Everyone can post if drivers should be able to send, or Only admins can post to keep it read-only for drivers. Membership is managed for you: new active drivers are added automatically, and the channel can't be renamed or have its audience changed by hand. A chat admin can archive it; see "Archiving a channel" below.
Every driver also gets their own conversation, listed under Viki Conversations at the bottom of the sidebar. Each one holds that driver, Viki, and all of your admins, so any manager can pick up the thread. Each admin gets a personal Notifications channel at the top of the list, and your company starts with a Daily Roster entry under Recurring plus a starter set of personas (covered in the personas article).
Sections in the sidebar
Conversations are grouped, top to bottom, as Notifications, Direct messages, Company channels, Personas, Recurring, and Viki Conversations. Archived channels leave these sections; an Archived chats link at the bottom of the sidebar opens the page that lists them. Long sections collapse behind a "Show N more" link, and section headers carry their own shortcuts — starting a new direct message, marking a whole category as read, and so on.
Creating a channel
Press the compose button and choose the New channel tab. Give the channel a name, then set its audience — the part worth slowing down for, because it decides who's in it now and who joins later. You set it separately for two groups. For Admins, choose "All admins — new admins join automatically" or "Only selected admins." For Drivers, choose "All active drivers — new drivers join automatically," "Only selected drivers," or "No drivers" (the default for a new channel). Pick "Only selected" for either group and a picker appears so you can hand-pick people. A running count at the bottom tells you how many members will be added before you commit.
The Only admins can post toggle makes the channel read-only for everyone else — members can read but not send — and can be changed later in the channel's settings. Press Create channel and the channel opens.
Only chat admins can create or manage channels. Admins on the lower permission level can still send messages and start direct messages, so the New channel tab simply doesn't appear for them.
Managing a channel and its members
Open a channel and use the info pane to see About, Members, Pinned, and Files. The About tab is where you edit the name, description, both audience settings, and whether everyone can post or only admins.
The Members tab lists admins and drivers separately with a count, an Add members dialog, and a per-row remove button; whoever created the channel is tagged as Creator. If a group is set to "all," a note tells you membership is managed by the channel's audience setting rather than by hand — the trade-off for automatic upkeep. Switching a group to "all" backfills everyone currently on the roster, and drivers follow their status from then on: activate a driver and they join every "all drivers" channel, deactivate them and they drop out. Only active drivers can be added to a channel at all.
A Leave channel action appears in the info pane only on a channel whose admin audience is "Only selected admins", and never for the channel's creator. On an "All admins" channel there is nothing to leave: membership follows the audience setting.
Archiving a channel
Any chat admin can archive a company channel, a broadcast channel, or the All Company channel. Open the channel, open the info pane, and scroll to the bottom of the About tab for Archive channel. Confirm, and the channel closes to new messages and moves to the Archived chats page for everyone. History stays readable there, and any chat admin can press Unarchive channel to bring it back.
Archiving All Company also removes it from the driver app until a chat admin unarchives it. Anyone who joined the company in the meantime is added when it comes back.
Direct messages
The Direct message tab lists your other admins and your active drivers; searching filters both. Click one person to open the conversation immediately, or tick several people and press the start button to open a group message. Groups are capped at 10 people including you, with a warning as you approach it suggesting a company channel instead. A group message can later be converted into a private channel from its info pane if it outgrows itself.
To send a driver a text rather than an in-app message, open their conversation under Viki Conversations. The composer there shows a Send as toggle with Chat and SMS; SMS is disabled for drivers with no phone number on file, and the composer defaults to SMS for drivers who have never opened the app.
User permissions for driver direct messages
The User permissions dialog under Chat's ⋯ menu controls who can direct-message drivers. It appears only for admins with Settings page access.
The dialog has two layers:
Company-wide switches. Drivers can direct-message specific admins controls whether drivers can start a direct message with an individual admin. Drivers can message personas controls whether drivers can start a thread with a shared line like Dispatch. The two are saved together.
Per-user switch. Each admin has a Disable driver DMs switch.
When Disable driver DMs is turned on for an admin:
That admin no longer sees drivers in their own Direct tab, and drivers no longer see that admin as someone they can message.
They cannot be added to, or start, a direct or group conversation that includes a driver.
Their existing 1:1 driver DMs close for both sides. A system message in each conversation tells both the admin and the driver to continue on the shared line so the whole team can see it. The history stays readable.
Group DMs that already include a driver remain available to their other members, but the restricted admin sees a read-only composer in them.
They can still reach drivers through a persona, as long as your company has Drivers can message personas turned on.
Turning the switch back off reopens the 1:1 DMs that this setting closed. It does not reopen anything an admin archived by hand.
This is separate from page access under Settings → Users. User permissions governs driver DM behavior in chat; Settings → Users governs which pages each admin can open.
Announcements to many drivers at once
The Viki announcement tab is the broadcast tool. Write the message, optionally attach up to five files, then build the recipient list: All drivers adds everyone active in one click, the Channels section pulls in a company channel's driver members or today's rostered drivers from a recurring channel, and the People grid lets you search and select individuals. Recipients show as removable chips with a live count. Only drivers can receive an announcement; admins aren't valid recipients.
Above the message box, choose how it is delivered:
SMS (the default) texts every recipient, whether or not they use the app. Attachments are limited to five MMS-safe files, and the message length is held to text-message limits. A recipient with no phone number on file who has not signed into the app is named in a warning, and the announcement still goes to everyone else.
Chat delivers in the app only. Drivers who have signed in see it in the app; drivers who have not signed in yet see it when they do. Nobody is texted, and attachments follow the in-app size limit shown under the file picker.
Either way, a copy lands in each driver's own conversation, so the thread stays complete. Press Send Viki announcement to send.
Four related capabilities have their own articles: moderation tools for flagged messages, scheduling a message to send later, saved message templates, and personas for sending as a team identity like Dispatch.