Engagement can be life or death for software products. How much value an app delivers to users drives investment decisions and sales revenue. And because engagement and value are two sides of the same coin, measuring one can help you understand the other. Across the tech industry, Product Owners use a common set of product and user engagement metrics to show just how much value products deliver.

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.

Realtime is now a core user expectation. Whether you’re enabling online communities through realtime chat or creating shared workspaces for remote collaboration, a near instantaneous flow of data forms the backbone of modern software engineering. As such, most organizations have already had a discussion around whether to buy realtime infrastructure or to build it in-house.

CRDTs can sometimes be talked about as complex data structures that you use with CRDT libraries. And they can be that, but they don't have to be. Some of the natural solutions that any software engineer might come up to solve a problem in a distributed system are CRDTs, even though the implementer might not know or care that they are. It can be useful to identify label them as such.

Customer experience is changing. Research from Merkle shows that customer loyalty increasingly relies on an emotional connection, with frictionless interactions a core requirement. This means that the days of strictly regimented, one-off customer contacts are over. Instead, customers today expect an ongoing relationship with the brands they trust. Done well, live chat can be the ideal way to provide that ongoing connection.

Build vs buy conversations often start with cost. Specifically, “Can we build and maintain this in-house for less than a vendor wants to charge?” And that’s a pretty good opener. In fact, we’ll tackle that in the next post in this series. But as we saw in our previous installment, building your own realtime experience infrastructure is complex. Comparing costs makes little sense if you haven’t already considered the risk that this complexity brings.

With more than a billion players worldwide, online games are a significant cultural, social, and economic phenomenon. And while innovative gameplay gets people through the door, it’s the social aspect of online gaming that keeps them playing. That puts social functionality front and center when it comes to the difference between an ongoing hit and an expensive flash in the pan. And players are quite particular about how they want to engage with others.