Introducing Delivery Receipts: Notifications that create user certainty for sent messages

Today we’re excited to launch Delivery Receipts as a part of Sendbird’s modern messaging essentials, a simple way to create certainty for your users that the messages they send are delivered.

Delivery Receipts confirm message delivery

Delivery receipts tell a sender that their message has been delivered successfully to a recipient without indicating whether the recipient has read it. With the certainty of a delivered message, the sender can manage other conversations or new parts of their workflow, improving their user experience, engagement, and workflow efficiency.

The delivery receipt appears as either a “Double grey tick” or a “Delivered.” The “Double grey tick” is accessible through the Sendbird UI Kit.

For developers, the delivery receipt allows added opportunities to set-up or customize notifications, or create additional events in-app using delivery confirmation as a condition. These opportunities give developers greater flexibility for customizing messaging features.

Delivery Receipts is crucial for transactional use-cases

Delivery Receipts are essential for transactional use-cases and private conversation:

• Marketplaces
• On-demand food and grocery delivery
• On-demand ridesharing
• Customer support cases
• Dating
• Group chat

Delivery confirmation gives the sender the certainty that their message was sent to the recipient, so the sender can move to the next transaction with confidence. Whether the sender is a seller in a marketplace, a driver, a courier for food delivery, a customer support agent, that confidence allows them to work with more transactions more quickly and increases transaction efficiency. Imagine that a food courier can leave the food on the doorstep, send a message, receive delivery confirmation, and move on to the next delivery.

Delivery Receipts also keep people engaged in conversation by allowing them to continue chatting without worrying that the conversation is stalled because of a bad connection or technical difficulties. It also prevents users from experiencing (too much) anticipation in a private conversation like in a dating app or group chat.

Marketplaces

Delivery receipts increase engagement and drive more transactions for buyer-to-seller marketplaces.

Adding delivery receipts to buyer-to-seller chat gives buyers and sellers certainty that their message was successfully delivered. With this certainty, they can manage multiple conversations and, rather than wait for a response, move on to other conversations with other buyers and sellers. Sellers could manage multiple offers or products at once. Buyers could find the best deals by managing multiple conversations.

Food delivery

Delivery Receipts develops confidence in the communication experience, increase courier efficiency, and give important context for support requests for on-demand food delivery.

Delivery Receipts gives couriers certainty that their message was successfully delivered—whether it is about leaving the food at a predetermined location, or trying to get in touch with the consumer. With the certainty of successful communication, the courier can move on to the next delivery. Delivery receipts also provide crucial context for the communication history associated with an individual order. Delivery receipts will come in handy when managing customer support requests.

For the consumer, delivery receipts give peace of mind with the certainty that their message was successfully delivered to the courier—whether it is about a special drop-off location, a door code for an apartment building, or otherwise.

Overall, delivery receipts create clear communication, important context and a better user experience for on-demand food delivery, while also improving operational efficiency for delivery logistics.

1:1 and many-to-many conversations

Delivery Receipts givess private conversations the certainty that messages are delivered, while maintaining privacy, and develop the interpersonal anticipation that increases response and engagement.

As such, delivery receipts are important in dating apps, where it’s important to hide whether or not a user has read a message. Instead, delivery receipts give senders certainty that their messages were successfully delivered. For many-to-many conversations, delivery receipts maintain conversation momentum, increase anticipation and overall user engagement, and accelerate response rates.

Delivery Receipts complete the message lifecycle for developers

Before Sendbird offered Delivery Receipts, there was no way to confirm whether a message arrived at a recipient’s chat screen—it was the missing piece of the message status puzzle. Now with the launch of Delivery Receipts, Sendbird enables developers to create message status notifications for every possible stage of the message lifecycle, including confirmation that a message has been delivered to its recipient.

That means every app can now access the exhaustive feature set to build the tell-tale experience of leading messenger apps: typing indicators, offline messaging and sent, delivered, and read receipts for every message.

Now building messenger-grade status messages is possible, using the four stages of the message lifecycle:

1. Sender types a message and sends it, i.e. with offline messaging
2. Message is sent to server, i.e. with sent update
3. Message is delivered to the recipient’s device, i.e. with Delivery Receipt
4. Message is read by recipient, i.e. with Read Receipt

The following information shows how developers can use Sendbird Chat API to notify users about the complete message lifecycle.

Stage one: Sender types a message and sends it

1. If the Sender has a good network connection, then the message is sent successfully to the Sendbird server
2. If the Sender does not have a good network connection, the message can be queued in the local cache of the sender’s device using Sendbird SyncManager (Offline messaging). The SyncManager sends the message to the server when good network conditions are restored.
3. The developer can display a ‘grey clock’ symbol in the chat bubble to inform the sender that the message is queued and the chat service will automatically send the message when good network conditions are restored.

Stage two: Message is sent to the server

1. This event occurs when the message leaves the sender’s device and successfully sends to the server (or the server successfully receives it).
2. To acknowledge this event, the developer can choose to alert the sender that the message has been sent to the server in two ways:
   • By displaying a ‘single grey tick’ in the chat bubble
   • By displaying the word ‘Sent’ in the chat bubble

Stage three: Message is delivered to the recipient, i.e. Delivery Receipt

1. This event (Delivery Receipt) occurs when the message leaves the server and successfully delivers it to the recipient’s device.
2. To acknowledge the delivery receipt, the developer can alert the sender in two ways:
   • By displaying a ‘double grey tick’ in the chat bubble
   • By displaying the word ‘Delivered’ in the chat bubble

Stage four: Message is read by the recipient, i.e. Read Receipt

1. This event occurs when the message has been read by the recipient.
2. To acknowledge the read receipt, the developer can alert the sender in two ways:
   • By displaying a ‘double blue tick’ in the chat bubble
   • By displaying the word ‘Read’ in the chat bubble

With the addition of Delivery Receipts, Sendbird now offers developers the complete message lifecycle. Now developers can flexibly customize or create a messenger-grade message status experience for their end users.

Use it to create better engagement, transparent communication, and better-managed conversations all across the message lifecycle no matter the network conditions.

Delivery Receipts: Create certainty for users that a message is delivered

Whether your users are buying or selling, delivering or ordering food, coordinating rides, dating or just chatting, delivery receipts give them certainty that a message is delivered to its recipient. However small it may seem, this creates huge benefits to transactional and private chat use-cases, helping users manage many conversations or deliveries at a time, create important context for a conversation, and increase user engagement and operational efficiency. With the launch of delivery receipts, you can inform your users at every stage of the message lifecycle.

Delivery Receipts are available in both the Sendbird Chat API and SDK, and in the Sendbird UIKit.