Care.com Scales Chat & Cuts Messaging Bugs by 90% with Stream

At a Glance

A Homegrown Stack That Couldn't Keep Up

For families searching for care, communication is how they evaluate caregivers, schedule interviews, and ultimately decide whom to trust.

But at Care.com, the infrastructure behind that communication had become a significant pain point.

The company relied on a homegrown messaging system that handled communications like push notifications and emails. Its web, iOS, and Android apps each used custom-built interfaces for inboxes and conversations.

The system did not hold up under the platform's scale.

Message delivery suffered from noticeable latency, and load times slowed across all three platforms. Every new feature required custom engineering, and a ten-person team, whose responsibilities extended well beyond messaging, dedicated about half its time to fixing bugs, searching for optimizations, and building features just to keep the system functional.

Care.com needed a communication platform that could improve that experience without requiring its engineering team to continue building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

With Stream, the difference showed up quickly.

80-90% Fewer Messaging Bugs

Since implementing Stream Chat, Care.com estimates that messaging bugs have declined by up to 90%.

Messages are now delivered reliably and on time. More importantly, the engineering team no longer has to devote the same amount of its capacity to keep messaging running.

Instead, that team is working on forward-looking projects like embedded messaging, system messages, and entirely new product areas.

The impact was noticeable to users, too.

The team describes messaging as going from one of Care.com's biggest NPS detractors to a smooth customer experience, and one it can now continue building on.

Scaling to Millions of Messages Per Month

Today, communication is deeply embedded in how families and caregivers connect on Care.com.

Users invite and apply to jobs through messaging. Those conversations help families vet potential caregivers and can continue after someone has been hired to coordinate the job itself.

And usage continues to grow.

Over the last 12 months, monthly message volume increased 27%.

Care.com now supports that activity across 1 million monthly active chat users.

Bringing Video Interviews Into Care.com

Moving to Stream allowed the company to build more of the hiring experience directly into its platform.

For many families, exchanging messages is just the beginning of the vetting process. Care.com strongly encourages families to take additional steps, like conducting a video interview, before making a hiring decision. Safety is core to the Care.com experience, and face-to-face conversation, even virtually, helps families feel confident in who they're inviting into their home.

Care.com integrated video interviews directly into its experience with Stream Video.

Care.com has also built additional workflows around those conversations, including scheduling reminders for upcoming video interviews, custom system messages, intent-based merchandising opportunities, and CTAs that prompt users to take relevant actions.

As a result, Care.com is driving better marketplace outcomes.

The Impact

When messaging wasn't meeting users' expectations, and maintaining it was consuming too much engineering time, Care.com turned to Stream.

Today, chat and video support:

• 1M monthly active users
• Millions of messages per month
• Thousands of video sessions

Behind every one of those numbers is a family finding the right caregiver, a little faster and a little easier.