Key takeaways
- One group per physical location keeps site information out of company-wide chats.
- Membership should mirror who actually works the site, including guests like the client or a contractor.
- Pin post orders, access notes and emergency contacts so they stay on top of the group.
- The 🚨 alert notifies everyone in a site group with one tap.
- With CGuard Pro, site groups include on-duty guards, the office and the client, and off-duty guards can't read them.
Most operations are organized by place: a client building, a branch, a warehouse, a construction site. Communication should follow the same shape. When every location has its own group, people stop scrolling past messages about places they never visit, and managers can see at a glance what is happening at each site.
Why site communication breaks on personal chat apps
A single company group on a personal messenger seems simple at first. As the number of sites grows, it turns into noise:
- Messages from ten sites in one stream. The night guard at the warehouse reads about a parking issue at the mall and misses the note that matters to them.
- No control over membership. Whoever created the group is the “owner”, and people who moved to another site, or left the company, stay inside.
- Clients mixed with staff. Adding a client to an internal group exposes everything; leaving them out means relaying every update by hand.
- Instructions get buried. Post orders and access codes shared once are gone after a busy day.
How C Chat handles site groups
In C Chat, a team (workspace) belongs to your company and contains as many site groups as you need, up to 30 per team on the current plan. Each group has its own members, pinned messages and history.
A typical site group works like this:
- Standing information is pinned. Post orders, opening hours, the site supervisor’s name and emergency contacts go into pinned messages.
- Day-to-day updates stay short. People use replies and reactions to answer a specific message instead of starting new threads, so conversations stay readable.
- Urgent problems use the alert. The one-tap 🚨 emergency alert notifies everyone in the site group at once. For life-threatening situations, people should still call their local emergency number first.
- Evidence lives with the site. Photos, videos, files up to 25 MB and voice notes are posted in the group they belong to, not in someone’s private thread.
If you coordinate many locations from one office, the multi-location coordination page covers how to keep the office in the loop without drowning in notifications.
Setting it up: groups, members and roles
Start with a list of your active locations and the people assigned to each one. Then:
- Create your team in C Chat and give supervisors the admin role so they can manage members.
- Create one group per site with a predictable name, for example “Site – Riverside Plaza” or “Store 14 – Downtown”.
- Add the staff who work that site. People who rotate between sites can be in several groups.
- Invite guests where it helps: the client’s facility manager, the cleaning contractor or a maintenance vendor. Guests join that one group by invitation.
- Pin the site’s instructions and ask everyone to mute other sites’ groups if they are members of several.
For a deeper walkthrough built for guard companies, see how to set up site groups for security teams. The same structure works well for cleaning and janitorial teams, where each client building gets its own group, and for condos and HOAs, where the front desk, security and management share one channel.
Message formats and checklist
Site groups stay useful when everyone posts in a few predictable formats:
| Message type | Example format |
|---|---|
| Arrival | “On site – [name] – [time]” |
| Update | “[area]: [what happened] – [action taken]” |
| Request | “Need: [what] – by [time] – @[person]” |
| Issue | Photo + one-line description + location in the site |
| End of shift | Handover template (pinned) |
A quick checklist for each new site group:
- Name follows the team convention.
- Site supervisor is an admin.
- Post orders and emergency contacts are pinned.
- Client or contractor invited only if they need to be there.
- Everyone knows when to use the 🚨 alert and when to just post a message.
Security and oversight
Site groups often contain client names, alarm procedures and access details, so who can read them matters. C Chat protects messages with TLS in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest, with a separate key for each organization. Owners and admins can audit and export the team’s group conversations, which gives the company a record of what was communicated at each site. Direct messages between people remain private.
Security companies get an extra layer through the CGuard Pro integration: each site group contains the guards on duty, the office and the client. With on-duty access, guards who are off shift cannot read the site group, and a guard who is let go is removed instantly. Read more about how this fits security companies and the condo front desk and security workflow.
Getting started
Pick your three busiest sites and create their groups first; once the format works there, roll it out to the rest. C Chat is free for now within the plan limits described on the pricing page, and you can start right away in the browser at getcchat.com/c.
Frequently asked questions
What is a site group?
A site group is a group chat dedicated to one physical location, such as a building, a client property, a store or a job site. Only the people who work there or need updates about it are members, so every message in it is relevant to that place.
Can the client be in the site group?
Yes. Guests such as clients, contractors or cleaning staff can join a specific group by invitation without becoming full members of your team, so they only see the site they are part of.
How many site groups can I create?
On the current free plan, a team can have up to 30 groups and up to 50 members. If you run more sites than that, you can split operations across teams; each account can belong to up to 5 teams.
Should I create one group per shift as well as per site?
Usually not. One group per site, with handovers posted at the end of each shift, keeps the history in one place. Separate shift groups make sense only when shifts never need to see each other's messages.