Beacon’s Chat feature offers the ability to have one-on-one and group chat rooms to provide communication between members of an agency account.
Chat Room List Navigation:
- On the top menu bar of the Beacon Dispatcher interface click the Chat icon to open the Chat Room listing
- Chat Room list search bar — Search for specific chat rooms
- All members chat — Indicated by a Star icon. This is the agency account (data center) chat room. Every dispatcher and responder registered under the data center can see and use this chat room
- Incident chat —Indicated by a Bell icon. These are Incident-specific restricted chat rooms that can only be accessed by Web Users and Responders who are currently assigned to the incident. Each incident will have a designated chat room automatically created. Once the incident has been completed the chat room will become inactive and any messages and attachments shared in the Incident chat will be saved to the Incident Report.
- Group chat —Indicated by a Multi-Member icon. These are manually-created chat rooms comprised of multiple members (view next section on Creating Chat Rooms to learn more)
- Individual chat — Indicated by a Single Member icon. These are manually created chat rooms between two account members — i.e., two Dispatchers or a Dispatcher and a Responder (view next section on Creating Chat Rooms to learn more)
- Create New Chat
Creating chat rooms
To create a chat room:
- Click the New Chat icon in the top-right corner of the Chat Room List
- Add Members to the chat room by clicking their name. Members added to the chat room will be displayed above the contacts list
- Enter the desired Chat Room Name
- When ready, click the Save icon to create the chat room
- The chat room interface will open (not shown)
Managing Chat Rooms
Once a chat room is created there are a few options to control it.
To manage a chat room:
- Locate and click the Chat Settings
- Leave Conversation — Clicking this will remove the current Web User. If they want to be re-join the chat room again, they will need to be added by another member of the chat room.
- Members — Click to view the current chat room member
- Click the 3 dots next to a member’s name to open the remove member menu.
- Click the pop up to remove the member from the chat room
- Add Members — Click the button to open the contacts interface an add members to the chat room
- Click a contact name to add them to the chat.
7.a – New members to the chat room will be displayed above the contacts list - When ready, click the Save icon to create the chat room
* Additional Notes:
Off-Duty Responders can send and receive chat messages, but they will not be notified of them by Push Notification until they are On-Duty