Built with Meteor in 6 Months, Chatra Chatbots Score 45k+ Users
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We’re all used to chatbot integrations popping up in the corners of our favorite websites. They take the heavy lifting out of customer support, providing us with speedy, on-demand assistance 24/7 (including holidays).
That’s why Gartner researchers predict chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations worldwide by 2027 [*].
Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) systems, chatbots are getting better at understanding context and simulating human conversations.
According to Uma Challa, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, “When designed correctly, chatbots can improve customer experience and drive positive customer emotion at a lower cost than live interactions.”
Chatra is one of those well-designed chatbots — and it was built with Meteor in just six months. So let’s explore Chatra’s journey, challenges, and triumphs in this case study.
Chatra Has Joined the Conversation 👋
Chatra was founded by Slava Olesik, Yaakov Karda, Maria Karda, and Artem Polikarpov in 2015. Their beautifully-designed, easy-to-use live chat and social messaging tool for small and medium-sized businesses allow brands to connect with their target audience in real-time or asynchronously.
Though business owners can’t speak with every potential customer, communicating via chatbots, email, and social messaging adds a personal touch to help accomplish the same thing. They can answer questions, solve problems, and boost online sales in a friendly, helpful way.
Improving how eCommerce businesses and startups communicate with their customers opens the door for more revenue. So it’s not surprising that predictions show consumer retail spending via chatbots will reach $142 billion by 2024 [*].
Innovation and the right partnerships make all the difference in the highly competitive global chatbot market. And Chatra’s success caught the attention of a major player in the eCommerce game.
Sendinblue Acquires Chatra in a Package Deal Worth $47 Million
Sendinblue, a Paris-based SaaS marketing solution, has the only all-in-one platform that empowers businesses to build customer relationships through end-to-end digital marketing campaigns, transactional messaging, and marketing automation.
To solidify their eCommerce relationship marketing juggernaut, Sendinblue acquired Chatra, along with analytics company Metrilo and Shopify notification pusher PushOwl, for a total of $47 million in 2021.
In a press release, Chatra Co-Founder Yaakov said:
“With our technology, we’ll be able to further develop Sendinblue’s existing chat tool. Users will be able to deploy automated chat on their websites within 30 seconds. No need to have an advisor managing the chat; it’ll be automatically triggered by visitor behavior and provide personalized responses.”
And that’s just one fantastic feature that makes Chatra’s 45,000+ clients happy.
Check Out Chatra’s Superpowers ✨
Chatra provides users with a centralized platform for all customer interactions, be it live chat, emails, or social media. Though loved by clients across industries ranging from libraries to financial institutions, most of Chatra’s customers are online stores.
Chatra’s Meteor-built tech gives brands the power to:
Easily Customize Proactive Chats and Behavioral Triggers
Setting up targeted, or proactive, chats in Chatra is an excellent way to maximize the number of sales and/or leads, as well as minimize bounce rates.
Everything can be customized to reflect different brand voices without any difficult coding or complicated trigger workflows.
Plus, Chatra’s free mobile apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android allow brands to communicate with customers anywhere on the go.
Manage Customer Interactions from One Multi-Channel Dashboard
Chatra isn’t only a live chat platform; it’s also an incredible multi-channel solution to manage customer interactions across:
- Live website chat
- Offline website messengers
Once users connect their inbox and Facebook Business Page, they can forget about switching between different browser tabs.
They’re able to collect customer feedback, clarify concerns for shoppers, and boost cross-sells and up-sells. This personal touch often increases the number of orders businesses receive and their average order value.
Collect Valuable Customer and User Data
Chatbots can be tasked with collecting contact details and other customer data. Chatra monitors real-time website visitors and provides users with a list of their browsing history, location, OS, and more.
Brands can use this customer data to greet visitors with effective personal messages or make it easier to find what they’re searching for.
Chatra’s website visit analytics and user profiles also allow brands to improve the quality of their services. This data can help teams revamp user interfaces to boost user experience scores.
This valuable data can also be leveraged to send targeted emails based on customer behavior to supercharge marketing efforts.
Now you can see why Sendinblue knew acquiring Chatra would be a boon for their digital marketing solution. And we only scratched the surface of what the Chatra team’s capable of.
🤩 See how easy it is to set up Chatra live chat on your website and learn how to get the most out of their tech here.
Why Chatra Builds With Meteor 💬
Chatra’s journey with Meteor began before they even had the idea for their universally-loved chatbots.
One of Chatra’s co-founders built his previous platform with Meteor. His positive experience encouraged the team to leverage Meteor’s open-source framework for seamlessly building and deploying web, mobile, and desktop applications in Javascript.
Meteor also granted the Chatra team ready-made solutions that became a solid base for their new platform. They found Meteor’s wrappers for mobile applications or methods of communication between server and client “very handy,” especially for the aspiring startup Chatra was back then.
“With Meteor, we got multiple aspects covered at once: the server and client part, templates, database, data subscriptions, and reactivity.”
Those perks, combined with Meteor’s code once, deploy everywhere ethos, allowed the small Chatra team to swiftly build their platform from scratch in just six months!
The Chatra Tech Stack
Chatra uses Elasticsearch as its primary search engine serving the user and message search. Blaze and Stylus come into play for their front-end architecture. And the team’s utilizing Redis and Mongo for databases.
Chatra vs. Scaling Challenges 📈
Chatra says Meteor’s reliance on Mongo Oplog wouldn’t scale horizontally. According to the team, “every instance had to chew through every Oplog entry.” As the load increased, horizontal scaling would “pretty much stop working.”
But always up for a challenge, the Chatra team spent quite a lot of time working on a custom Oplog alternative for data reactivity, which they still use today.
Chatra Co-Founder Artem created a pub/sub system that works through channels. It uses Redis to communicate between Meteor processes, bypassing every Oplog change hitting every Meteor instance (which created the exponential scaling problem).
Performance improved so much that Chatra “no longer worries about performance (not anytime soon, at least).” Currently, ≈300 active sessions cost about 5% CPU load on a single machine. Before Artem’s implementation, ≈150 sessions cost nearly 75% of CPU load.
💻 Artem describes how his Redpubsub works and more performance benefits Chatra scored in this GitHub post.
So What’s Next for Chatra?
The Chatra team continues to maintain and improve its star chatbot platform. They’re currently in the process of reworking their entire infrastructure to make it more robust.
But ever since joining their ranks, Chatra’s future is now intrinsically linked with Sendinblue. As Chatra pushes to the next level, they’re building and contributing to Sendinblue’s reputation as a global leader in marketing and customer relationship management.
One of their new launches includes:
Sendinblue Conversations (Still Powered by Meteor)
Chatra created a fork of their platform that integrates into the Sendinblue platform. They first launched their beta Sendinblue Conversations at the end of 2021, and now their new product is available to all Sendinblue users.
Sendinblue Conversations allows for “some very cool use cases,” such as launching a campaign on WhatsApp and then answering inquiries from Conversations or nurturing leads from live chat with an automation workflow.
We can’t wait to see what else this partnership adds to the future of chatbots!
So What Can Building with Meteor Mean for Your Team?
With popular frameworks and tools right out of the box, Meteor lets you focus on building features instead of configuring disparate components yourself.
So whether you’re an expert developer or a small team hoping to launch your startup to greatness, you’ll create top-quality web, mobile, and desktop apps in a fraction of the time.
Over 500k developers trust Meteor, and we’ve helped companies like Chatra skyrocket to the top of their industry.
See what extraordinary feats you can achieve with Meteor now!
