[New] Square Team Communication

[#1]

Hi Square Community! 👋

We’re excited to launch a completely new product, Square Team Communication, a real-time messaging and knowledge sharing tool for you and your team.

Benefits of Square Team Communication

• One-on-one and group messages can be sent and received on mobile devices through the Square Team app

• Share important announcements, news, updates and knowledge with your team

• See which team members have read important messages and conversations

• Keep communication flowing with fun, work-appropriate emojis that let your team react to messages with one tap

• Give your team one place to communicate, view their schedules and timecards, and stay in sync on the go with the Square Team app

Using Square Team Communication is easy

• Sign up for a 30-day free trial for Square Team Communication

• Download the latest version of the Team app on iOS or Android and log in using your Square email and password

• Click on the “Messages” tab in the Square Team app and start a message

• If you don’t have any team members added to Square, visit Staff > Team in your Square Dashboard and invite a team member

For more help getting started with this new product, check out these articles. Let us know if you have questions.

‌✅‌ Get started with Square Team Communication

✅ Square Team app for employers

‌‌✅‌‌ Square Team app for team members

‌✅‌ Square Team app troubleshooting for team members 

[LukeNieuw]

VERY Cool!! I will be trying this out 100%

[Stacelyn24]

I was really excited about this when I first started reading...but unfortunately, we use Square Appointments to manage our team and this looks like it will benefits Square Shifts more.  No worries...I know it will be coming around for us soon lol 🙂

[Jimmy_]

Hi @Stacelyn24 ! Help me understand your perspective more. Your team could use both Square Appointments and Square Team Communication at the same time. Were you looking for a specific way Appointments and Team Communication would work together?

[DSander]

so for $1.50 per employee I can send them a one way message. No replies other than emoji? No way for them to communicate to each other? So I could continue to just send them an email for free? Did I miss something?

[TheRealChipA]

@DSander Team members can reply or just acknowledge with emoji. They can also start their own conversations. Etc. 

yes you can continue to do what you are doing for free. The purpose here was to give us one place for all company related communications. This was team members don’t have to share phone numbers or email addresses, which some don’t want to do. This way, when an employee is terminated or leaves, they are removed from company communications and such. 

it’s a full-function communications app, basically. 

[DSander]

well, that's much better than it's described on the intro page. 

This is all it says;

"Send important messages to team members across your company, instantly. Team members will be able to confirm they’ve read the announcement on the Team App, but not reply to your messages."

There's no mention of team to team comm

thanks

[TheRealChipA]

@DSander I agree that the description could be more complete.  I think they just assumed that we would assume all of that was available.  And, of course, we all know what assumptions can lead to! LOL.  

I should also mention that I had one team member who was concerned that I could read private messages between two team members, even if I was not in the conversation.  This is not true.  Private communications between team members are private.  And, also, once a team member is no longer employed, they lose access to all communications in the app — private or not.  I’ve just made it a policy (in my employee handbook) that employees are to use Team Communication for business-related messages at all times.  And that it is up to them how they wish to communicate for non-business stuff.

Best,

[pigsnoseinn]

I have a feature request to have scheduled team announcements in the dashboard

[Jimmy_]

Thanks @pigsnoseinn . That's a great request. I'm just curious what type of messages would you use scheduled announcments for? I just want to better understand your use case so we can build the feature correctly. Thanks

[pigsnoseinn]

Two use cases.
Late night messages
So, for example, a bar supervisor might want to make an announcement to the whole team late at night or after their shift. However, their shift ends at 00:00 or even later, so it would be good to schedule a message to send out to the team at a more reasonable time, like 09:00 or 10:00, so it doesn't remind people in the middle of the night.

Events

Scheduled announcements to remind the team of upcoming events. You could just remind the team on the day of the event and also add if there are any special instructions/details.

All the scheduled announcements could go in an outbox as a list of reminders so they could be edited.

[Jimmy_]

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Our team will certainly look into this

[pigsnoseinn]

Also, I had another idea: announcements that only get sent to specific jobs.

[NickS]

I am really interested in this service and have been on the trial. However, we have been using Crew for a while and it has way more functionality for much cheaper. It definitely has its bugs and customer service is non-existent...but the functions it offers is hard to leave. For example, Team Resources area of the App, easier control of the App. We have several locations and by default Square Communication put those locations in the App and I have no way of removing them, as some are not relevant or are inactive. Hope it evolves and gets more user friendly for sure. 

[TheChocolateGuy]

I had high hopes when Square acquired Crew App. Crew needed a lot of work, but the idea that square was on a path towards integrating team communications was pretty big so I signed up for and paid for Crew for way too long.

As soon as team communications launched we switched over. Considering the price, the team communications feature is lacking some very key features.

We need channels. Places where the relevant audience can go and find the relevant information. At this time, you can't have the same set of people in multiple chats. For example, if I would like a training channel where we post information and discuss training topics. I don't want supplies discussions going on in that same chat.

We need to be able to pin a topic or chat.

Where are the polls? No, not emojis... actual polls with a simple additive bar graph. Team members want to be heard, polls are a great tool to give a voice to the collective.

As I become more active in this forum, I plan to post the following on sentiment until it changes: Stop nickel and diming your customers with all these subscriptions. Its ridiculous. You're making money hand over fist off of us on these fees. You're getting close to the point where its worth walking away and dealing with having multiple vendors & tools.

[pigsnoseinn]

Polls would be a great idea!

[NickS]

I don't disagree with this sentiment. We process over $2M with Square in CC charges and then have $1,300+ in monthly fees for the services we use without much support or customer service response when we have issues or requests. 

[DSander]

Use 7 Shifts. We just switched from Square Shifts to that. It does all those things very well.

[Jerry_]

👋Jerry from Square here. Apologies for the delayed response, I recently took over product development for Team Communications in the New Year. 

Let me start by saying - I hear your frustrations and know our team's hard at work addressing as many of them, as quickly as possible. A couple feature updates we've added in Jan 2024 based on seller feedback and onboarding of Crew functionality:

1. Channels: we now support the creation of multiple chat conversations with the same individuals.
   • To unlock this: a) give a custom name (i.e., 'managers', 'training', etc) to the existing conversation with the team members of interest, b) after renaming, proceed to create a brand new chat conversation with the same team members, c) repeat a) & b) unlocking an unlimited number of chat conversations with the same group of individuals.
2. Team Files: we now support folders in Team Files, helping sellers and their teams easily organize, manage, and find items in their file repositories on-the-go from the Team App.
3. Announcements: we now support attachments directly in team announcements. Teams can now seamlessly embed additional documents, images, videos, etc directly to a team update or reminder, allowing richer information/context to be shared.

While I know there's still a lot to do, we are working to actively close the gap with Crew as we more closely integrate the two products this year. Here are some things you can expect:

1. Better labour management & optimization tools through our Square Shifts product, closely emulating what you might have used in Crew.
2. We are also actively evaluating and considering additional Team Communication enhancements. What we've heard so far:
   • Better Control:
     • Pinning of chats/topics
     • Scheduling of future messages or announcements
     • Audience Targeting
       • For announcements this could include sending announcements to certain roles/jobs
       • For messaging, auto-maintaining conversation membership by role/job
   • Better Team Engagement:
     • Polls

I'll circle back as we roll out more features, but would continue to welcome additional feedback and ideas. This honest and unfiltered feedback is important to us and is what motivates us to continually improve our products and experiences for all our sellers.

[pigsnoseinn]

I am very excited to see some future updates in labour management & optimization and the Teams app. Great App so far!

[jeremymichels]

Square, Inc. is a financial services and mobile payment company, and like many companies, they likely utilize various tools and platforms for team communication and collaboration. Here are some common methods Square might use for team communication: