Message Templates in Chat

Most of what you type to drivers, you type over and over: the reminder about start times, the note about a missing DVIC, the thank-you after a clean week. Message templates let you write that wording once, save it under a name, and drop it into any conversation in a couple of clicks. The page describes them exactly that way — "Reusable snippets your team can drop into any conversation. Variables personalize each send."

Open Chat and click the ⋯ button at the top of the conversation list ("More chat tools"), then choose Templates. That opens the Message templates screen: a searchable list of your company's templates on the left, and an editor with a live preview on the right. You can also get there without leaving a conversation — the templates popover in the message composer has a Manage templates… link at the bottom.

Templates are company-wide. There's no personal template list, so anything you save is available to everyone on your team who uses chat.

Click New template (top right, or at the bottom of the list) and you get an empty editor. Fill in Template name — this is what your team sees in the picker, so make it descriptive, like "Route start reminder" — and Message body, which is the actual wording that gets sent. Names are capped at 100 characters and bodies at 2,000, with a running counter under each field. Both are required; you can't save a template with a blank name or an empty body.

Press Save when you're done. A small "Unsaved" marker sits next to the template name whenever you have changes that haven't been saved yet, and it stays there if a save fails, so you always know whether your edit actually stuck. Editing an existing template is the same flow: pick it from the list, change the wording, save.

To remove one, select it and click Delete. You'll be asked to confirm, and the dialog is blunt about it: this action cannot be undone. There's no archive or restore, so if a template is only seasonal, it's usually better to reword it than to delete it.

The list itself is searchable, and the search box matches both the name and the body — handy when you remember a phrase but not what you called the template. Each row shows when it was last updated and small chips for any variables the body uses.

A template body can include variables, written in curly braces, that get replaced with real values when the message goes out. Three are supported:

Under the message body you'll find an Insert variable palette. Click a chip and that variable is appended to the end of the body; chips for variables already in use are highlighted, so you can see at a glance what a template personalizes. Only those three names are recognized. Anything else you type in braces is left in the message exactly as written, which means a typo like {DriverFistName} will go out to the driver as literal text — a good reason to use the palette instead of typing tokens by hand.

The Live preview panel underneath shows the finished message as a driver would see it, with sample values filled in, and it has a Chat / SMS toggle so you can sanity-check length and tone for a text message specifically. When a body has no variables, the preview tells you plainly: "No variables — sends exactly as written."

In the message composer, click the Templates button in the toolbar under the input box. A popover opens with a search field and your template list; click one and its wording drops straight into the composer with the variables already resolved. Note that inserting a template replaces whatever you'd already typed in the box, so pick your template first and then edit around it. Nothing sends automatically — the text lands in the composer and you press Send yourself, after any tweaks.

How the driver variables resolve depends on where you are. In a one-on-one conversation with a single driver, {DriverName} and {DriverFirstName} fill in with that driver's name. In a group channel with many drivers — or none — the driver variables come out blank rather than picking one person's name for everybody, so write templates for group channels without them. {CurrentDate} fills in everywhere, in your company's timezone.

There's no separate permission for templates. Anyone on your team who can open the Chat page can create, edit, and delete them, and any manager who has been restricted from Chat won't see the page at all. Because the list is shared company-wide, deletions and edits affect everyone.

Recurring messages can point at a template as a live link, so editing the template later changes what future sends say. Scheduled sends, personas (choosing who a message appears to come from), channels, and message moderation are all separate topics with their own articles.