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, and only admins can post — drivers read it, they don't reply into it. Membership is managed for you: new active drivers are added, and the channel can't be renamed, edited, or archived by hand.
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channels, Personas, Recurring, and Viki Conversations, with an Archived section that appears only once something has been archived. 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.
You can leave a channel you don't need to follow, and its creator can archive it — that closes it to new messages and moves it to Archived for everyone. History stays readable, and it can be unarchived at any time.
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 SMS 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.
Press Send SMS announcement and each recipient gets a text, whether or not they use the app — and a copy lands in that driver's own conversation, so the thread stays complete. Only drivers can receive an announcement; admins aren't valid recipients.
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.