Building in-app chat with Rocket.Chat

Conversations are the lifeblood of every business, customer relationship, and community. So it's no surprise that many of the web and mobile apps we use daily now have conversational functionality. We all expect to be able to chat with our favorite companies, organizations, and communities at any time, anywhere.

In-app chat is no longer a nice-to-have addition to the app - it's an expected part of the user experience.

Read on to learn why you should add chat functionality to your app and how to do it with a ready-made Rocket.Chat foundation. 🚀

What are the benefits of in-app chat for businesses?

The massive usage statistics of messaging apps on mobile devices have shown the world the power of texting. In-app communication has the advantage of keeping users within the app. If consumers can't communicate within the app, they'll find another way to do so. That means less engagement within the application and overall less stickiness for user retention.

✔️ Uninterrupted UX that drives engagement

In-app chats keep users on the app without switching to another messaging platform; this, in turn, drives higher engagement rates and seamless UX. The more your users have their conversations in your app, the more engaged they are with it.

✔️ Contextual conversations

Messaging within the app allows for less time spent in context-setting and more time getting to the heart of the problem. In addition, integrating in-app chat with the rest of the support channels and CRM leads to faster resolutions and increased customer satisfaction.

✔️ Creates communities

In-app chats create bigger communities within the app and increase general downloads, memberships, or traffic.

In-app conversational experiences are everywhere

From support for Marketplace and on-demand services to group and individual channels in gaming and social apps, users want and need tools to communicate with your business and other users.

We generally categorize our in-app chat implementations into distinct categories to help our clients:

➡️ Community discussion groups

A wide range of organizations uses Rocket.Chat to drive branded experiences in their community discussion forums. These implementations typically use one of two operating models.

The first one is to customize Rocket. Chat's appearance to match the organization's branding and take advantage of 900+ permission options. The second one is using Rocket.Chat APIs and SDKs to deliver back-end messaging services for completely customized front-ends.

End-users are provided with fully-branded conversational interactions that are easy to manage and scale in both operating models.

➡️ Marketplace communication

Many marketplace interactions can be streamlined with in-app chat interactions. Conversations are everywhere, whether connecting a delivery driver with a customer, building services with a tenant, or a job applicant with a hiring manager.

Rocket.Chat provides the tools to make these experiences a reality. In most of these cases, a completely customized front-end interacts with Rocket.Chat APIs and SDKs to power the user-facing experience. The admin platform delivered by Rocket.Chat simplifies configuration, administration, monitoring, and analytics.

➡️ Provider-participant communications

Rocket.Chat is an ideal solution for integrating customer messaging with the data and delivery capabilities required to provide a seamless customer experience.

Rocket.Chat's custom interfaces are used in patient management systems, EdTech platforms, and other applications. In each of these cases, service providers can communicate with their users through the context of their service delivery platforms.

In contrast, users (patients, students, job candidates, etc.) can access their service provider through the messaging channel of their choice (live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.)

Additionally, developers can use our apps engine development toolkit to extend the capabilities of Rocket.Chat.

Why build with Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat provides the tools you need to quickly build and launch secure conversational experiences integrated into your organization's web and mobile apps.

✔️ Accelerate time to market

Use our REST API and SDK to develop fully custom user interfaces or leverage white labeling platform options to create a chat experience that fulfills your needs. Use the time you would have spent developing from scratch to differentiate yourself from the competition and improve UX.

✔️ Own your conversations

Deploy your Rocket.Chat environment on your servers, your private cloud, or we'll host your dedicated environment for you. Regardless of your choice and degree of customization, your conversations and environment are portable, private, and protected.

✔️ Build on a proven platform

Our REST API is extensive, js.SDK is limited but focused and a great tool for managing WebSocket connections. Live chat widget can also be customized in behavior and appearance, and our LDAP/SAML/OAuth2 capabilities enable you to manage your authentication and user provisioning according to your organization's needs.

✔️ Ensure extensibility

Activate omnichannel features so that your users can chat with your community or organization via popular messaging apps, branded web chat, and even video and voice calls.

Think about using an app engine to, for example, pull out customer data.

Enable automated conversations with chatbot automation and optimize management of customer conversations using omnichannel queue management tools and analytics.