Anecdotally, we know chat has a profound impact on essential app metrics. Whether through interviewing customers for case study stories or gathering feedback from developers experimenting with Stream’s chat API/SDK solutions for their passion projects, messaging functionality can keep users in an app for longer, increase user engagement, satisfaction, retention, and more.
Stream powers in-app chat for thousands of products and over a billion end users. But we didn’t know how the chat API quantitatively affected our customers — until now.
We’re excited to share the results of the Stream Chat Survey, which polled over 100 current customers ranging from enterprise-size businesses to startup companies on how Stream Chat impacts their key performance indicators.
Improved User Engagement, Satisfaction, & Retention
Chat customers overwhelmingly report that after integrating the Stream Chat API, their apps and platforms experienced increased user engagement, user satisfaction, and user retention, and improved bottom-line metrics such as conversion rates and daily active users (DAU).
The vast majority of customers experienced increased user engagement, an important metric that can indicate an app’s overall success. User engagement is measured in several ways, including in-app clicks, session length, session intervals, and more.
We found that 70% of Stream Chat customers saw their user engagement increase by at least two times after integrating the Chat API.
While in-app messaging used to be a nice-to-have functionality, today’s savvy users expect their apps to have a chat feature that allows them to communicate with others without giving out their phone numbers or email addresses. Clearly, chat boosts user satisfaction. Improved user satisfaction helps elevate app metrics such as downloads, session intervals, and conversions.
After integrating Stream Chat, 76% of customers saw their app’s user satisfaction increase by at least two times.
App retention rate — the percentage of users who continue to engage with an app over a period of time defined by app owners — help developers and marketing teams understand the “stickiness” of their product. Retention rates are notoriously difficult to nudge upwards. In fact, a quarter of downloaded apps are only opened once, and depending on the industry, apps that have a 30% open rate on day one could have just a 2% open rate a month after download.
Across verticals, 45% of customers said their app’s user retention rate improved by at least two times after integrating the Stream Chat API.
Why Product Teams Chose Stream Chat
Our survey also explores why customers choose to integrate Stream Chat in the first place.
While 34% of product teams either had chat they built in-house or had chat functionality from a third-party provider, the lion’s share (66%) of customers did not have any in-app messaging at all. But many needed chat — and they needed it fast to keep pace in a competitive app environment.
Over 40% of chat customers also said they chose to integrate Stream Chat because they wanted to focus their valuable engineering resources on their app’s unique features — not on building in-app messaging from scratch, which could take months to implement and years to correctly scale.
Quantifiable App Improvements
The results from the Chat Customer Survey represent Stream’s ongoing commitment to build API and SDK solutions to elevate the quality of your app. Thanks to intuitive SDKs and globally scalable API infrastructure, our customers are seeing quantifiable improvements to their most important app metrics.
Try Stream Chat by activating your free, no-strings-attached Chat trial today. For 30 days, you’ll be able to tinker with the API, download Stream’s customizable UI kits, and explore our developer-friendly SDKs.