2023: Revolutionizing customer communication with in-app CPaaS services
Building a modern CPaaS for digital leaders, enhancing customer communication through apps
As the Christmas lights turn on and 2023 draws to a close, we’re reflecting on a year marked by tech innovation, product growth, and customer success. At Sendbird, we’ve been hard at work building in-app communication technology, expanding customer reach, broadening the scope of 2-way human engagement, and introducing autonomous conversations with revolutionary generative AI chatbots.
In 2023, we took a major step forward by extending our service beyond chat and video calls, introducing live streaming. This expansion empowers brands to connect with their customers worldwide in real time, fostering lasting relationships that drive sales, loyalty, and more.
We also introduced in-app notifications: one-way programmable and scalable messaging capabilities (A2P messaging), ideal for alerts, reminders, promotions, feedback, and more. Digital leaders use in-app notifications as a holistic app retention strategy and to direct customers on their journey to conversion. Finally, we've enabled online businesses to have conversations where they were previously unfeasible due to the absence of a community, the need for a two-sided network or support staff, or by enhancing efficiency through postponing human intervention until needed. One prime example is the introduction of an AI chatbot for our chat integration with Salesforce, effectively increasing ticket deflection and only involving agents to resolve cases that require human attention.
We appreciate the acknowledgment from API:World, with the 2023 API Award in the Best in Communications APIs category, as it underscores the value digital businesses can attain through effective in-app communication, encompassing engagement, conversion, and retention.
Sendbird awarded Best in Communications APIs
At Sendbird, we believe customer communications are at the heart of building relationships and getting things done. Here's a glimpse into the exciting tech we released for in-app customer communication in 2023.
In-app CPaaS products that enhance digital customer communications
2023 saw two major product launches: generative AI chatbots and in-app notifications!
Autonomous customer communication with groundbreaking generative AI chatbots
Sendbird Chat, one of our core products, surged to new heights with the introduction of one of our most important product launches of the year: a ChatGPT integration that allows users to harness the power of ChatGPT in their own web or mobile app. With this integration, developers can build AI chatbots with only a few lines of code using Sendbird's chatbot API, and non-devs can seamlessly add conversational AI chatbots to their app via the user-friendly Sendbird dashboard. By training them with first-party data from customer emails, SMS, chat, calls, customer relationship management software (CRM), and related business content, ChatGPT AI chatbots better comprehend context, enabling them to provide personalized and relevant information.
Because our AI chatbot interface can seamlessly integrate whichever AI engine customers prefer, we introduced a Llama-2 integration and a PaLM-2 integration. These integrations include essential features like suggested replies for managing conversation flow or predefined answers to prevent generative AI hallucinations. With the Llama-2, customers can also use an open-source LLM, meeting stringent privacy and ethical requirements. With a no-code dashboard setup and a low-code API integration, any online business can be up and running with a customizable AI chatbot in minutes.
We also created our own AI chatbot, SmartAssistant, and deployed it on the Sendbird Docs. SmartAssistant, a knowledge AI chatbot designed for web and mobile apps, is a no-code, easy-to-deploy solution. With file and URL ingestion for building bot knowledge, in-dashboard LLM configuration, prompt engineering, testing, and deployment in chat channels, the SmartAssistant will effectively engage customers throughout their entire journey. Try the demo, and head to the dashboard to create your own!
In-app notifications: Achieving a 96% delivery rate and 2x conversions for half the SMS cost
In 2023, alongside AI chatbots, we launched Sendbird Notifications, a flexible, customizable, media-rich solution for business-to-customer messaging in apps. This low-code, high-converting tool allows businesses to send uncluttered, safe, and persistent in-app notifications, using a UIKit for quick integration and templates for on-brand, interactive notifications. Integrations with Braze and CleverTap enable digital marketers to create rich in-app notifications from their existing engagement platforms. Digital businesses experience a doubled click-through rate (CTR) compared to push notifications or SMS, at half the SMS cost. Sendbird Notifications is the ideal service to unify customer communication in apps, and is the most engaging and converting channel in omnichannel communication.
There’s no limit to how you can take your customer communications to new heights with Notifications - check out 9 in-app notifications use cases, all the ways that in-app notifications boost your business, and take your in-app notifications strategy to the next level with this ultimate guide. If you’re ready to get started, head over to the Sendbird dashboard to send your first in-app notification in minutes.
Revolutionizing live chat support for Salesforce's Service Cloud
2023 also marked the general availability launch of the Salesforce Connector, which enables a modern chat experience for support agents. The Salesforce Connector takes an enterprise chat solution, which in many cases is an afterthought, and transforms it into a rich, modern chat experience within the existing Salesforce instance. This improves the quality of customer engagement, reduces the time to case resolution, and increases CSAT.
The Salesforce Connector integrates Sendbird's modern chat UI interface and functions, including Sendbird’s SmartAssistant generative AI chatbot. With Sendbir Chat, Salesforce Service Cloud customer support agents can work on multiple support cases simultaneously and use AI chatbots to deflect easy customer requests or seamlessly get summarized context when the support case is handed off. Using AI, a stable chat service, and beautiful interface enhancements for the Salesforce Service Cloud's chat increases support agent efficiency and the overall customer experience, which drives greater loyalty and retention.
Try our Salesforce Service Cloud Connector and take support chat to the next level!
Elevating trust & safety with a moderation tool for user-generated content
We launched Sendbird Advanced Moderation, a suite of content moderation tools for user-generated content that merges the best of human insight with the precision and efficiency of automation. Sendbird Content Moderation is built upon 5 pillars: Detection, Evaluation, Decision, Execution, and Logging. Visit our blog to learn about the moderation features.
Sendbird Advanced Moderation for user-generated content (UGC) requires no coding or integration work, so getting up and running in minutes is easy. With Sendbird’s content moderation service, you will boost moderators’ and community managers’ operational efficiency while improving trust & safety through speed, consistency, and flexibility.
Join customers like Kakao and Match on their trust and safety journey, and let's build a safer digital world together. If you are an enterprise customer and want to try Sendbird Advanced Moderation, sign up for the private beta trial on our product page. For all other customers, many free chat and add-on content moderation features are available throughout our chat plans described on our pricing page. Contact us to learn more!
Building with a customer communications API: Enhancing the developer experience with new features that help devs build faster
At Sendbird, we believe exceptional business communication goes hand in hand with developer empowerment. Our products, and the features we’ve built this year, reflect that commitment.
Embracing the no-code/low-code movement: Introducing a no-code feature configuration tool for developers building chat apps with Sendbird's UIKit
In 2023, we introduced an innovative developer tool for the Sendbird Chat UIKit: a no-code feature configuration tool designed to enhance how developers customize a chat app built with UIKit. Integrated into the Sendbird dashboard, this tool allows developers to easily modify the functionality and design of their custom chat apps. Replacing the previous code-centric approach, this low-code, user-friendly dashboard enables quicker in-app chat development and reduces the need for additional developer resources, saving time and money.
The video below provides an excellent walkthrough of how to build a custom chat app from scratch using the UIKit.
Leading language and framework support: Flutter chat SDK, React Native feature parity for UIKit, and updated Kotlin samples
This year, we announced our Flutter chat SDK v4!! This version introduces several significant updates:
Flutter chat SDK v4: We have implemented a new interface and main architecture for our Flutter chat SDK, providing a unified experience across iOS, Android, and JS platforms.
Consistent naming: We have resolved naming inconsistencies throughout the codebase, ensuring a more streamlined and cohesive development experience.
Codebase refactoring and rearchitecting: We have undertaken extensive refactoring and rearchitecting of the codebase, resulting in improved code quality, maintainability, and performance.
Collection interface: A new Collection interface has been added, enabling more efficient management of Group Channels and messages.
Flutter allows developers to use a single codebase and deploy on multiple platforms, similar to React Native. To help React Native developers, our React Native UIKit achieved feature parity with other UIKit platforms this year! For details, please see the docs. Finally, our developer community indicated that they needed up-to-date language support for Kotlin. Our engineers took this feedback into consideration and updated all our code snippets to Kotlin. See our Android UIKit samples!
Looking ahead to 2024: What the new year has in store for your favorite in-app customer communications API
2023 has been filled with remarkable communication API capabilities to go beyond chat with 1-way and autonomous messaging. As the world embraces generative AI, Sendbird is ideal for quickly deploying chatbots across web and mobile apps. With an early start in adopting the technology, we also have become a valued partner to our customers looking for insights into best practices to effectively use Generative AI chatbots and meet important global data & security requirements.
A warm thank you to all our customers who’ve entrusted us to transform their customer conversations through their apps with our modern CPaaS communications API platform and services. Your unwavering faith in our solutions fuels our innovation, and your feedback guides our continuous improvement.
As we step into 2024, we remain steadfast in our commitment to unifying 1-way communication and increasing customers’ reach. We will continue to push the boundaries of generative AI, unlocking new possibilities for effective and personalized customer communication across channels. We look forward to shaping the future of customer communications together.
Onwards to 2024! 🥂
