How chat API boosts customer retention in mobile apps
Apps are part of the everyday consumer’s life. In 2020, 218 billion users downloaded mobile apps compared to 140.7 billion in 2016. And roughly 1 out of 4 people abandon these apps after just one use.
App retention relies on how immediately customers receive value during your app experience. Engaging your users is step one, but supporting then growing with them will ensure you stand out against the billions of other app experiences.
A five percent increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% increase in revenue.
In this blog, we’ll cover some tactics for increasing customer retention, including engaging with our users in vegan ways (read: no spam) and perfecting the onboarding process. But there’s a common theme within our guide to boosting customer retention using chat API:
What is customer retention?
App retention is customer retention if you’re a business with an app, and ensuring your application offers everything your customers need is paramount.
Customer retention refers to the ability of a company to keep customers around. It's the rate at which customers continue to do business with a company, and it's a critical factor for the long-term success of any business.
Customer retention is crucial for modern companies that offer a mobile app experience. In this context, Chat API can be a powerful tool for improving customer retention.
Companies can create a more engaging and interactive user experience by integrating a chat feature into a mobile app. An in-app messaging function can lead to increased user satisfaction, higher levels of engagement, and ultimately, better customer retention rates.
How does your mobile engagement score stack up?
Why customer conversations boost retention
Conversations build relationships. When those conversations happen in-app, companies can personalize interactions and secure a sale.
Connection and engagement are critical elements to building a business. Reaching customers where they are with chat API allows this to happen seamlessly. A direct line of communication from business to user will enable customers to ask questions, provide feedback, and get support in real time.
When Sendbird customer PicPay added in-app chat, they increased transactions by 200%.
With Sendbird, conversations don’t have to stop at business-to-user. Our use cases span across industries to connect users with other users, delivery drivers to restaurants to customers, health care providers to patients, marketplace vendors to buyers, and so on.
One of the key benefits of customer conversations is that they allow companies to gather valuable feedback from users. By providing a direct line of communication, companies can identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to delight their users.
Customer conversations with Sendbird chat API also allow for personalization. Messaging history will cut the need to begin a brand-new support ticket each time something goes wrong. And research shows real-time personalization boosts customer lifetime value (and consumer patience for impersonal experiences is at an all time low).
Communicate seamlessly with buyers.
Finally, customer conversations are an effective way to build trust. By responding promptly and providing a helpful, friendly experience, companies can demonstrate their commitment to users and build a reputation for excellent customer service.
Why customer conversations boost retention
Conversations build relationships
Provide an access point for feedback
Create a sense of community
Chat API allows for personalization in customer interactions
Conversations build trust
How to increase app retention with Chat API
If you're looking to increase app retention with Chat API, there are several strategies you can implement to make the most of this powerful tool. Here are five tips to get you started:
Perfect the onboarding process
Ease of use is everything. Good UX educates customers about your app and highlights its key features. If your customer understands how to use your app and how it adds value from the get-go, they’ll be more likely to use it again.
Friction at any point of the customer journey should be squashed. Obliterated. Destroyed. Onboarding is perhaps the most important part of the journey in that first impressions are everything.
Related reading: The only UIKit you need
Plus all our documentation in one place
How Sendbird onboards customers
Hopefully, any Chat API you decide on will have put time and effort into their developer experience (DX), allowing your developers to build right out of the box.
Critical elements to ensure developers have a successful and smooth onboarding experience include:
Solid onboarding documentation with how-to steps and troubleshooting advice
Samples of the app for developers to see a working example in action
A dedicated site with further resources, such as GitHub
2. Re-engage your users with targeted messages
Once a user has left your app, you have to figure out how to bring them back in. Spamming doesn’t work; businesses have been there and done that with SMS.
With personalized, targeted messages you have the opportunity create a useful experience. But most brands aren’t utilizing personalization as well as they think they are.
Targeted notifications are the best way to ping a customer with content relevant to them. Here, data on user segments becomes valuable because you can direct them to the content that matters.
There are plenty of strategies to deploy with targeted notifications. Whether it be a timely promotion, coupon code, or content type – notifications have a way of driving engagement back into your app.
3. Inspire social interaction
You don’t need to be a social app to be social or appeal to social feeling. Even if your app doesn’t facilitate social interaction as its core product, you can still create an in-app environment where people can interact. Although there are many ways to do this inside your app, Sendbird believes that a conversation is behind every click, tap, purchase, or form.
You can build opportunities to have that very conversation in your app environment by leveraging a chat API.
When conversation is involved with a sale, brands have the potential to see a 21% increase in conversions. Mix in that social interaction with personalization and you have a great recipe for customer retention.
4. Securely monitor customer feedback
Chat conversations can be a rich source of feedback on how users interact with your app. Monitor chat conversations regularly to identify common pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to delight your users.
When support is integrated within your chat experience, you can provide a fully customized and integrated support experience within your app that meets the unique needs of your customers.
With Sendbird’s Unified Inbox, you can also separate chat instances so users can always tell a social notification from a support one.
Sendbird’s advanced transcription and security standards deliver a secure infrastructure for your app users. You don’t have to worry about sacrificing security for customer retention.
5. Surprise & delight with features & ease of use
It’s one thing to integrate a chat API that assists with messaging. It’s another to provide an end-to-end messaging experience that assists with completing a sale (or provides a service/completes an action).
Sendbird supports media for a modern chat experience with reactions, polling, and gifs.
In addition to Chat; Live, Notifications, Calls, Desk, and Unified Inbox add to the messaging capabilities and experience of Sendbird’s API.
Improve retention with in-app conversations
It is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So, in a period of potential global recession, retaining customers has never been more important.
Interacting with customers puts a personality to your business. It improves trust. Conversations open the door to a wealth of customer interactions, any of which can improve multiple aspects of the customer journey.
And if we’re looking full-funnel, In-app messaging helps attract the right customers from the start. Chat API balances both acquisition and retention, get started with a demo today.
