Challenge: Pluang wanted to replace its existing Telegram groups with an in-app messaging solution to create a more seamless UX for its investment community.
Strategy: Pluang evaluated Stream, Sendbird, and Amity but chose to integrate the Stream Chat API and React SDK because of its ability to scale, reliably support a high number of DAU, and provide a rich catalog of features to improve user experience.
Result: Pluang has seen its engagement rate for chat users skyrocket since implementing Stream Chat. The company's engineering team was able to easily integrate the solution thanks to Stream's robust documentation and dedicated customer support Slack channel.
About Pluang
Pluang is on a mission to transform money management in South East Asia with a simple-to-use, multi-asset investment platform powered by trusted communities. Users can invest in gold, the US market, crypto, and mutual funds through the platform. Pluang Plus is available to those who want to enhance their online investing experience with dedicated support, VIP rewards, exclusive in-app features, and more.
Building an In-App Investment Community
Looking to elevate the UX for all Pluang users, Product Manager Anggie Hendrata needed a chat solution to create an in-app community and replace the company's established investment groups on Telegram.
Hendrata says, "Indonesian culture is hypersocial—average social media usage ranges from three and a half to four hours per day. So when our users want investment information, they gravitate towards online social communities. We experimented with Telegram, but it has limitations. We couldn't connect it with our app and build the community we wanted within it to help users learn more about investing while transacting on Pluang."
By owning the user experience from end to end, Pluang could curate a more custom and centralized platform investors could trust, engage, and convert within. Hendrata also envisioned this chat solution to integrate with Pluang's Salesforce CRM to streamline account and record creation for the business.
Stream vs. Competing Solutions
With a clear goal in mind, Hendrata began vetting chat vendors to see how they measured up to her list of criteria. With over one million active users, Pluang was only interested in the most performant, reliable, and scalable chat API offerings.
"We evaluated Stream against Sendbird and Amity. Sendbird's group chat functionality was limited to a maximum of 20K users, while Stream Chat supports up to 1.5M. Stream offered a more competitive price and flexible payment structure than Sendbird or Amity," Hendrata says.
Integrating Stream Chat From the Other Side of the World
Stream sweetened the deal by allowing Pluang to gain full access to the product during the contract approval process. The company's engineers were able to set up their Stream Chat account and customize their dashboard early. They were also impressed by the high-touch level of support and accommodations the Stream team made to ensure smooth onboarding, despite being on opposite ends of the world.
"Stream created a dedicated Slack channel for us to use while implementing the chat solution. This level of prioritized customer support allowed us to get our questions answered very fast, in less than 24 or sometimes even 12 hours, despite our time zone," Hendrata says.
Hendrata notes that Stream's technical documentation for the chat API and React SDK was comprehensive. She also says the Stream developers and support teams were able to discuss Pluang's use case in great detail and provided hands-on assistance with various customizations and integrating the API with Salesforce.
Pluang's Favorite Chat Features
Pluang's in-app chat needed to be feature-rich and dynamic to compete with the intuitive design pattern of familiar messaging apps like Telegram.
Hendrata notes that the message reactions functionality is especially popular and gives the chat a more social and active feeling. "For every message sent, there is a reaction---it helps users know how people feel when reading their message," she says. Hendrata mentions that message threads and replies are a user favorite, too. She adds, "Sometimes it is more interesting to read comments of the post than the post itself."
Pluang also leverages in-app chat moderation to keep group chats on topic and users safe and prevent PII from being shared.
Hendrata says, "Investment is a very sensitive product. Some people express dissatisfaction with bad language whenever the price goes down, especially with the volatile crypto and US stocks. Moderation helps keep the chat clean and the community safe. It is easy to use and what is provided out-of-the-box with Stream Chat is helpful."
How Pluang Evaluates Stream Chat's Performance
The ROI of Stream is measured carefully by the Pluang team. Hendrata shares that by integrating Stream Chat, the investment platform has not only seen an increase in in-app conversions but has even doubled user engagement.
"We use three main metrics to evaluate Stream Chat. The first is the conversion rate of a user to a transactor, the second is engagement, and the third is retention. Indonesia is hypersocial by nature, but we were able to use Stream Chat to increase time spent within the app even more. By adding chat to Pluang's news feed, users who engaged with it spend twice as much time in the app compared to those who do not engage," Hendrata says.
Hendrata shares that both Pluang customers and developers are satisfied with Stream as a chat provider. She notes that the app's use case for the integration is broad but is impressed that Stream can fulfill all aspects of it, including the community-building side and CRM integration side of things.
Hendrata concludes the interview and shares, "Given that we can customize everything to suit our needs, the competitive price, performance, and stability, I would recommend Stream to any company looking for a chat solution."
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