Background

Our US-based client provides a digital marketing platform for the automation and management of SMS and MMS campaigns. A wide variety of businesses, from small offline retailers to restaurants to large eCommerce stores, use the technology to increase repeat purchases and retain customers with personalized text messaging. Maafor full-stack developers augmented the internal IT team to modernize the existing system and create new features.

Challenges

During our cooperation, Maafor specialists helped the client solve the following challenges.

• Boost communication efficiency with the target audience
• Reduce manual work when handling marketing campaigns
• Ensure hassle-free registration for new subscribers
• Enable marketers to get updates via mobile and stay in touch with customers
• Make the platform suitable for small businesses

Value Delivered

Redesigning chat software to allow for more interactions and real-time updates

Platform users rely on chat software to reach their customers. Our team took part in redesigning this critical module and extending its functionality with new features. The new version has better performance, the ability to support more interactions, and real-time updates. A marketing specialist working in chat can instantly see all changes in the customer contact list including unread messages, alterations in client names, and deleted contacts. The updated chat also prevents adding the same client to multiple contact lists.

Implementing scheduling and improving automation features

The platform enables sending text promotions to multiple clients simultaneously. Previously this feature lacked flexibility. We participated in implementing new functionality to customize messaging. Among other things, marketing specialists can schedule massive campaigns and set their duration. Our engineers also helped the client improve automation capabilities — like extracting meaningful data (names, dates of birth, emails, etc.) from messages and adding it to a contact form.

Creating a separate registration service

With the growth of the user base, it became hard to register new subscribers on the main website. To fix this issue, the client opted for building a separate registration service communicating with the core system. The new service, we contributed to, features tailored UX design, improved performance, and an advanced form collecting comprehensive information on customers before allowing them onto the system. The service also enables marketers to create sub-accounts which is very useful for large eCommerce stores with multiple departments. Those who don’t complete the registration process for some reason can continue later from the step at which they dropped out. Such users are identified by a reporting tool we helped develop.

Developing UI and backend features for a mobile app

The major concern of marketers was that they couldn’t receive notifications from the chat on their smartphones. To get updates and communicate with customers, they had to log in to a system from a computer or laptop since the platform was not mobile-friendly. That’s why the client decided to develop a lightweight mobile application that supports basic chat operations — create, send, get messages, attach a picture, and so on. The app keeps market specialists updated on all activities of their target audience even when they are away from the computer. Our team was involved in building both frontend and backend features — for example, a login flow with multi-factor authentication, conversation lists, a contact details screen, and more.

Launching a lightweight chat version

The main version of the chat software provides a lot of tools like search, filtering, template generation, and so on. However, not all companies need such a feature-rich product. Many small businesses would prefer a simpler solution. To meet the needs of these users, a lightweight web version of chat was created. It allows marketers to connect and communicate with end customers as well as store essential information on them.