Internal Chat

Collaborate with your team directly within RapiDesq. Internal chat provides 1-to-1 direct messaging and group conversations with real-time delivery, typing indicators, @mentions, presence tracking, and unread counts — all powered by the same infrastructure that delivers your customer conversations.

Overview

Internal chat is RapiDesq's built-in team messaging system. It lets users, supervisors, and admins communicate in real time without switching to a separate application. You can send direct messages to any colleague in your organization or create group conversations for team coordination, escalation workflows, and shift handoffs.

Internal chat is built on the exact same infrastructure that powers customer messaging. Internal conversations and customer conversations flow through the same delivery pipeline and share a single real-time connection per browser tab — so internal chat inherits the same delivery behavior as customer messaging without opening extra connections.

Note — Internal chat messages are visible only to the participants in the conversation. They are never exposed to customers and never appear in customer-facing conversation histories.

Where It Lives

Internal chat is available from the round chat button in the bottom-right corner of every page. The button carries a badge with your total unread message count, so you always know when something is waiting — no matter where in the app you are working.

Clicking the button opens the Team Chat drawer: a list of your conversations, sorted by most recent activity, each showing a message preview and its own unread badge. Filter tabs across the top narrow the list:

All — everything you participate in
Chats — internal direct messages and group conversations
Tickets — customer ticket conversations you've subscribed to
Notes — contact note threads

On desktop, selecting a conversation opens it as a chat pane docked at the bottom of the screen. You can keep several panes open at once and minimize the ones you are not actively reading — useful for keeping an escalation thread in view while you work tickets. On mobile, conversations open as a full-screen view instead.

Starting a Direct Message

Direct messages are 1-to-1 conversations between you and another user in your organization. They are ideal for quick questions, private coordination, or reaching out to a specific colleague about a customer issue.

To start a direct message:

Click the chat button in the bottom-right corner to open the Team Chat drawer.
Click the + (New Conversation) button.
In the Start New Chat dialog, search for a colleague by name or email. Online colleagues are listed first, with a live status indicator on each avatar. You can message anyone in your organization — they do not need to be on your team.
Select the person and click Start Chat.
Type your message and send it.

If a direct conversation already exists between you and that person, selecting them opens the existing conversation rather than creating a duplicate, with the full message history preserved.

Creating Group Conversations

Group conversations let multiple people communicate in a single shared thread. There are two ways to create one from the New Conversation dialog:

Select multiple people in the Chat view to start an unnamed group conversation with exactly those participants.
Create a Room — switch the dialog to Room, give it a name (e.g., "Tier 2 Escalations", "Billing Team", "Morning Shift Handoff"), select the members, and click Create Room. Rooms are named groups, so you can have several rooms with the same people for different purposes.

All members see the conversation in their chat list immediately and can start messaging right away.

Tip — Use descriptive room names that clearly communicate the room's purpose. As your chat list grows, a well-named room like "Billing Escalation Queue" is far easier to find than "Team Chat 3".

Common use cases for group conversations include:

Team coordination — a dedicated room for each support team where members discuss issues, share knowledge, and coordinate coverage.
Escalation channels — rooms that include senior users or subject-matter experts, used to quickly get help on complex customer issues without formal ticket transfers.
Project-based rooms — temporary rooms for initiatives like a product launch or a training rollout.
Shift handoff channels — rooms where outgoing shift members summarize open issues and incoming shift members ask follow-up questions, creating continuity across shifts.
Cross-team collaboration — rooms that span multiple teams for issues requiring input from different departments.

Real-Time Features

Internal chat provides a full suite of real-time communication features — no polling, no refresh button.

Instant Delivery

Messages are pushed to every online participant the moment you send them. If a participant is offline, the message is waiting for them — with an updated unread count — the next time they come online. When a new message arrives and you don't have the conversation open, it opens for you automatically: maximized if nothing else is open, or minimized with an unread badge if you are mid-conversation elsewhere.

Typing Indicators

When a participant begins composing a message, all other participants in that conversation see a real-time typing indicator. This helps avoid message collisions in fast-paced discussions and gives you confidence that a response is on its way.

Unread Counts

Each conversation in your chat list displays a badge showing how many unread messages it contains, and the chat button itself shows your total. Unread state is tracked per conversation and per user — each participant has their own independent counts, cleared when they open the conversation and read the messages.

Presence Tracking

Presence indicators show whether a colleague is currently online — in the user search when starting a chat and on participant avatars. This is useful for knowing whether to expect an immediate reply. Presence is tracked automatically from the user's connection state; there is nothing to configure.

Rich Messages

The internal chat composer is the same rich-text composer used across the platform. In internal conversations you can:

Format text with the rich-text toolbar and insert emoji
Attach files to share screenshots and documents with the conversation (see File Attachments)
React to messages with emoji reactions
Quote a previous message to reply to it in context, with a jump-back link to the original
Edit or delete your own messages, subject to your organization's message policies
See read indicators showing how many participants have read your message

Using @Mentions

@Mentions let you direct a message at a specific person within a conversation.

To mention someone:

Type @ in the message composer.
Begin typing the person's name. An autocomplete list appears showing matching people.
Select the person, complete your message, and send it.

Mentions are visually highlighted in the message and notify the mentioned person, making them the most reliable way to get a specific colleague's attention in a busy group conversation. Rather than expecting everyone to read every message, use @mentions to pull specific people into a discussion when their input is needed.

Tip — Use @mentions for time-sensitive requests or questions directed at a specific person. In an active group conversation, a mention ensures the right person sees the message promptly rather than it being lost in the flow.

Working with Tickets from Chat

The chat drawer is not limited to internal conversations — it also connects to your customer-facing work:

Open a ticket conversation as a chat pane. From the ticket workspace you can pop the current ticket's conversation out into a docked chat pane, labeled with the ticket ID. This lets you keep responding to a customer while navigating elsewhere in the app. Ticket conversations you participate in also appear under the drawer's Tickets tab, and each pane includes a View Ticket shortcut back to the full ticket. When a ticket is resolved or closed, its conversation becomes read-only.
Escalate an internal conversation to a ticket. If a team discussion turns out to be a real customer issue, use Escalate to Ticket from the conversation to create a customer support ticket directly — you provide the customer's contact details and a priority, and the ticket is created and routed like any other.

Internal Chat vs. Internal Notes

RapiDesq offers two distinct internal communication tools, and understanding when to use each keeps information organized and discoverable.

Internal Chat

Internal chat is real-time team messaging between users. Conversations exist independently — they are not attached to any specific ticket. Use internal chat for:

Quick questions to a colleague ("Can you take a look at this?").
Team coordination and announcements.
Discussions that span multiple tickets or are not about any specific ticket.
Shift handoffs and status updates.
Escalation discussions that involve multiple team members.

Internal Notes

Internal notes are comments attached to a specific ticket. They appear in the ticket timeline alongside customer messages but are marked as internal and never visible to the customer. Use internal notes for:

Documenting troubleshooting steps taken on a specific ticket.
Sharing context with the next user before transferring a ticket.
Recording decisions or approvals related to a particular customer issue.
Adding information that future users handling the same ticket should know.

Note — The key distinction is where the information should live. If the context is about a specific ticket and should be findable when someone reviews that ticket later, use an internal note. If the discussion is a general team conversation or a quick back-and-forth, use internal chat.

A practical example: if a user needs help resolving a tricky billing issue on a specific ticket, they might send a quick internal chat message to a billing specialist asking for advice. Once the specialist provides guidance, the user should add an internal note to the ticket summarizing the resolution approach. That way, the decision is preserved with the ticket where anyone reviewing it later will find it, while the real-time discussion happened quickly over chat.

Tips & Best Practices

Create a dedicated room for each team — Every support team should have its own room for day-to-day coordination. This gives team members a single place to ask questions, share updates, and discuss ongoing issues.
Set up escalation rooms — Create rooms that include senior users or subject-matter experts. When a frontline user needs help with a complex issue, they can post in the escalation room and get quick guidance without waiting for a formal ticket transfer.
Use shift handoff rooms — Outgoing shifts can summarize open issues and important context in a dedicated handoff room. Incoming shift members read the handoff messages and ask follow-up questions in the same thread.
Use @mentions for urgent items — In active group conversations, important messages can scroll by quickly. When you need a specific person to see something, @mention them so they are notified.
Prefer internal notes for ticket-specific context — If a discussion is about a specific ticket and the information should be available to anyone who handles that ticket in the future, put it in an internal note on the ticket. Chat is great for the real-time discussion; the conclusion belongs on the ticket.
Keep room names descriptive — As your organization grows, generic names like "Team Chat" become ambiguous. Use names that clearly describe the purpose, such as "Technical Support — Tier 1", "Billing Escalations", or "Q1 Migration Project".
Use direct messages for sensitive conversations — When a discussion involves confidential information or sensitive feedback, a 1-to-1 direct message is more appropriate than a group conversation. Only the two participants can see the messages.

Tip — Think of internal chat as your team's real-time communication hub and internal notes as your ticket-level documentation. Using both tools appropriately keeps real-time discussions fast while ensuring important decisions are preserved where they are most useful.