4 new ways to engage customers in your mobile app

This year, Sendbird released products and features to help our customers better engage, grow, and support their customers more conveniently and effectively in their mobile apps.

As part of our product evolution, we’ve realized the mobile app offers an exciting new channel for brands to connect and communicate with their customers. While many brands use public messengers to do this, we’ve seen that integrated, in-app messaging drives higher transactions, social interactions, and user retention.

Brands with a native chat experience also own their data and can leverage it to personalize their communications.

To assist brands in building relationships in-app, Sendbird released polls, scheduled messages, Unified Inbox, and Sendbird Live as new capabilities to engage customers through in-app conversations this year.

And for our developers, we released new SDKs and UIKit to make it quicker and easier to implement these new features.

New feature and product releases in 2022 from Sendbird

• Polls

Polls serve as a conversation starter in a community and a way to get real-time feedback from customers at scale. Polls provide just enough structure to make it easier for people to engage without posting an original message in a community setting.

Polls lower the barriers to community conversations. Community leaders and brands can post polls to better understand community member preferences.

For community leaders, in-app chat polls simplify collaboration by giving anyone in a group a voice to effectively share their opinions and make suggestions. When used correctly, polls send a powerful message to your community. They show that you are listening and care and want to understand them better.

• Scheduled Messages

We released a scheduled messaging feature to allow brands to plan and push out customer communications in advance in a more programmatic way. Scheduled messages could be in the form of small marketing campaigns or helpful appointment reminders. Scheduled messages effectively trigger actions the brand wants users to take in the app.

• Unified Inbox

Companies communicate with customers for many different reasons. At Sendbird, we realized if all of these communications are streamlined within the mobile app, they also need to be centralized into one place for easy user access and management.

With Sendbird’s Unified Inbox, users can find all your brand communications in one place and keep the conversation going as if they were messaging a friend.

Chats related to support tickets, marketing promotions, transactions, and order updates are now saved and centralized in one view.

• Live Streaming

Live streaming video grew incredibly popular during the pandemic and has seen success with e-commerce companies in Asia. Sendbird saw success powering live chat integrated into live streaming events hosted by brands like TMON and Nexon. Through these opportunities, we expanded our investment in our video API to support hosting live video streaming events.

This fall, we launched Sendbird Live, a developer-friendly live-streaming platform built on WebRTC and ideal for pairing with real-time chat. With Sendbird Live, brands get an additional competitive edge to engage, grow, and monetize their audience on web and mobile applications.

From our Sendbird dashboard, admins can assign the live-streaming event hosts and participants (up to 10). Admins will also be able to monitor and moderate chat conversations during the event from our dashboard.

Quicker and easier development with better performance

Not only have we released new capabilities for our APIs, but we’ve also completely re-architected our UIKit and launched 5 new SDKs to make it easier for modern developer teams to implement these new features for greater in-app engagement.

In 2022, we released Swift, Kotlin, and TypeScript SDKs for Sendbird Chat and React Native SDK for Sendbird Calls. These new SDKs allow developers to use the modern languages they prefer to integrate chat within their apps. We also launched a Sendbird Chat SDK that works with apps built with the Unreal Engine. To help our customers get to market more quickly, we rebuilt our UIKit to offer more granular, modularized components for the chat channel header, message list, and message input. This further separates data and events, enhancing the developer’s freedom to customize in-app chat.

It’s been a very productive year for our product team, and we are excited about the innovation we have planned for the new year. If you’re curious about our product roadmap, schedule a time to connect with our team.

Learn more about our products and the innovation we have planned.