In-app messaging & notification center?
I'm looking to add in-app messages and a notification center to my SaaS. Basically the same as the notification icon on LinkedIn, Facebook, or here :)
I would like to notify users about:
- app updates / changelog
- transactional events (we currently send emails for some events, I'd like to be able to show them in the app too)
- less critical updates that don't warrant an email (e.g. suggestions to get more out of our product)
I've come across a lot of tools similar to Intercom and Userguiding that aim to increase user engagement with in-product messaging, but they all seem focused on 'in-your-face popups' rather than a list of actions which is what I am after.
Now of course I could build it myself... but it sounds it could end being a whole product in itself. Is there anything off the shelf that does what I'm after?
Did you find a solution yet? This could be useful for a couple of projects I'm working on, but hadn't thought of using that kind of notification system to do it.
How about leveraging an open source chat tool for the task? It’s far less riskier than the examples you cite because FB & LI have the engineering resources to build a less intrusive in-app system than say Intercom.
You could start a discussion by sharing a mockup of your vision of how a clean in-app interface could look to chatwoot and ask whether others might be interested. Even if they decline, you could still submit a pull request from your fork in the hope that others will resonate with your changes and request that it be upstreamed.
Maybe I didn't explain it properly (is there another term I should be using?) but I'm not looking for two way messaging/chat. I want to be able to send actional items to users within the app, i.e. a notification center.
Okay, now I see what you mean. Your reply below mentioning a microservice may have factored into my understanding of what it is you are trying to build.
Such a notification center will be tightly coupled with your app anyway so might be better to just build what meets your needs.
What's your tech stack?
A mixture of Rails and Elixir, but I have no problems in making this it's own micro-service if there is a open source system that I can build on.