Live chat is a baseline for customer service, as well as connecting users of two-sided marketplaces, live auction sites, and social networks. And it’s easy to see why.

Increased customer expectations are fueling the need for companies to adopt an omnichannel communication strategy. Research by Google shows 68% of consumers value convenience of communication highly, which is backed by a HubSpot study where people cite 13 separate channels through which they want to communicate with businesses, including live chat and social media.

An innovative new product idea can be genuinely exciting but it’s the execution that delivers value. How fast you can get a product or feature to market can be the difference between a solid return on investment or missing the moment because someone else got there first. With realtime experiences as a core part of almost every web and mobile based app, how well and how quickly you can deliver realtime infrastructure is a core factor in your time to market.

Retail’s great revolution from bricks and mortar to e-commerce might have seemed complete. But another chapter of the story is being written. As in-person retail fights back by focusing on in-store experience and service, a new online retail trend is helping to replace the human factor otherwise missing from e-commerce.