Messaging has become a part of our everyday lives in part due to its convenience for real-time chat communication and simple-to-use functionality. For instance, an iOS or text message on an iPhone or Android device from a friend, an email from a co-worker on Microsoft or Gmail, a team chat in a Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace, or even instant messaging through social media. These messaging and real-time chat applications play an important role in how the world interacts today, due to their immediacy and vast capabilities.
The benefits of a real-time chat application
A chat application makes it easy to communicate with people anywhere in the world by sending and receiving messages in real time. With a web or mobile chat app, users are able to receive the same engaging and lively interactions through custom messaging features, just as they would in person. This also keeps users conversing on your platform instead of looking elsewhere for a messaging solution. Whether it’s private chat, group chat, or large-scale chat, adding personalized chat features to your app can help ensure that your users have a memorable experience.
In this chat application guide, we’ll explore:
How custom in-app chat features enable user engagement
The long-term factors to consider when building a real-time chat application
How engaging messaging apps lead to an improved user experience
By the end of this guide, you’ll understand the benefits of implementing personalized, real-time chat app features to increase user engagement and retention on your platform.
What to consider when building real-time chat applications
More people are embracing virtual experiences as a way to connect with one another. From gamer group chat messaging in a live chat to e-learning and team communication using chat rooms and file sharing among co-workers, online chat applications have grown largely in popularity because of their ability to retain the feel of a real-time conversation, virtually. However, when thinking ahead to how you want to build your web app, a vital thing to consider is your customer's experience. What are the essential features and functionalities that are needed to make an engaging real-time chat app that will lead to user retention? Let’s dive in.
Real time chat needs engaging messaging features
A digital chat app that’s composed of real-time messaging features enables users to have an authentic and interactive experience.
Features like message reactions, stickers, emojis, GIFs, and voice calls and video chat, provide a way to engage your users directly on your app instead of external platforms–creating a more connected experience.
Other functionalities like identifying active users, push notifications, and message history—to name a few—also add to that immediacy by automatically detecting the presence of users in a real-time chat application.
For instance, PubNub Presence lets users know when their friends, fellow players, or collaborators are online. This prevents users from taking the conversation offline or to third-party apps, and keeps users engaged with your in-app experience. By implementing engaging, real-time features like this that your users want, you can enhance the overall chat experience for your community and customize chat to reflect your core product offering.
Scalability of your real-time chat app
When building a real-time chat application, another key factor to consider is concurrency. Whether a private chat, group chat, or large-scale chat experience, being able to build your chat app without worrying about user fluctuations and concurrency limits on your platform is crucial. And as your user base grows, choosing a chat app solution that scales with you will ultimately be a benefit as your developers can focus on delivering engaging in-app chat experiences to your users.
Your online chat application must operate reliably, in real-time
A reliable and secure web chat plays a large role in ensuring a positive user experience in your app. Making sure that messages between active users are being sent and received in real-time fosters an engaging chat where users can immediately interact with each other. As a way to help enable this, the PubNub Data Stream Network offers a scalable and secure solution with real-time functionality and enterprise-grade security.
In particular, being able to enhance your online messaging with engaging features such as GIFs or message reactions without limits or latency issues is vital. It helps to avoid message delays in a real-time setting, which improves the overall user experience by enabling that lively feel. That’s why in a chat built with PubNub, there are no limits or pricing penalties on the number of concurrent users.
Real time chat applications need modern security
When dealing with sensitive information like compliance requirements or personal user information, making sure that your real-time chat application has the proper security features in place is crucial for ensuring that the data of those using your app is protected—for instance, implementing an in-app HIPAA-compliant chat for a telemedicine use case. Additionally, other robust security safeguards for chat apps can be enabled through messaging APIs and access permissions enabled on the backend for who is able to control things at the user, device, channel, or key level.
Increasing real-time chat app engagement
The best way to identify the right real-time chat solution to build for your app is to think ahead to how it can support your users' needs as your app evolves. Are customized features like video calls or voice chat a must-have for your chat app? Or is pricing and time to market important to you? Having access to the features that can accommodate your use case not only now, but in the future, is invaluable.
Especially when focusing on in-app engagement, you’ll want to equip your users with real-time features and reactions right on your platform. Collaborative features like emojis, polls, live video streaming, and other interactive social features help bring users together. However, these engaging features that are able to scale and operate reliably can be hard to build and maintain, which is why a chat platform solution can provide you with the infrastructure you need.
Build real-time chat applications
Being able to focus on your customers' needs helps foster retention on your messaging platform. A real-time chat platform solution, like PubNub, gives you the flexibility to customize the user experience any way that you want with our unique APIs, SDKs, and pre-built chat components that can be easily incorporated into the way you prefer to build. This means you can add innovative features that other chat APIs won’t have, such as push notifications, user presence, geolocation, and more.
Our infrastructure saves you the cost of building and allows you to focus on your users instead of worrying about outages, latency, and high concurrency.
What makes a great real-time chat application?
In summary, the long-term benefits of building real-time chat into your app is to attract and retain more users, and keep them engaged. For online work, play, learning, or health, chat applications provide an engaging type: entry-hyperlink id: B1bjDv9iwO7sYZaJUO1Dp for user communities to interact with one another.
By choosing a chat solution that gives you complete control over the look, feel, and capabilities, it allows you to implement custom functionalities that keep your users engaged and present in your chat app–which leads to an overall improved user experience.
If you’re ready to build a custom, fully-featured real-time chat experience, get in touch with one of our experts. We’ll seamlessly get you up and running with custom real-time chat features for your app.
