How Chat Allows Accelevents to Differentiate the User Experience
Accelevents knew that building chat from scratch would be like reinventing the wheel. CEO Jonathan Kazarian shares why integrating Stream Chat allowed the virtual event platform to get ahead of competitors, and provide a differentiated user experience.
TRANSCRIPT
“We were lucky and smart in picking stream off the bat. It allowed us to come to market faster than our competitors did at this time when so many other businesses were needing to pivot as well. And I think it also gave us a leg up in terms of thinking about what are the things that Stream wasn’t necessarily designed or intended to be used for but we found a way to factor that into our application that worked out really well for us. Push notifications are something we’ve adopted quite heavily. Another thing are the presence indicators beyond chat — we’re a virtual event platform. If you’re going to step into a virtual expo booth, you want to know that someone is there before you get there. By using the presence indicators, we’re able to show the attendees that there’s an exhibitor, they’re online and ready to chat with you. Come on in to this booth. There are little things like that we’ve adopted that have been really powerful for us and for our customers.
Our events have a virtual lobby, where the event organizers are able to post on a message board. All of this information can get pushed out to attendees — maybe it’s promoting a sponsor or an upcoming speaker. But the other way we use push notifications are announcing that lunch is about to be served, or come check out this person in this venue hall. It’s another tool that’s spared us from having to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the architecture to support it while providing us the granular control, the scalability, the reliability in the analytics layer that we need to free our engineers up to focus on the differentiated user experience.”