2022 in review: Improving customer communications every day

Pranav Raj S

Pranav Raj S

Published on

3 minute read

As we look back at 2022, we see how it was a year of learning, hope, highs, and lows for all of us at Chatwoot. Most importantly, it was fun. It has been fun to build something for the community––for you, and to get feedback, learn, improve, rinse, and repeat.

We thank you for always supporting and believing in us. Thank you for being a part of this journey. And thank you for keeping us going throughout this and many more years to come. Let us do a quick replay––2022 in retrospect. 🔭

The happy milestones

Here is a quick overview of the milestones we had in 2022.

  • We now have more than 10,000 installations of Chatwoot worldwide. This includes major banks, government institutions, and fast-growing startups. 🌐
  • Our GitHub repo has been starred more than 14k times. ⭐️
  • We now have 231 code contributors (64 new contributors this year) and 279 volunteers in the translation community. 🏊‍♀️
  • Chatwoot natively supports 40+ languages now. ✍️
  • We had more than 1000 commits last year. 🔮
  • We now have 500+ subscribers on our YouTube channel. ▶️
  • Our Discord community has 1800+ members now. 💪
  • We revamped the entire Chatwoot website for a better UX. 👶

The product’s evolution

We released an improved version of the product every month, amounting to 12 major releases. The highlighted new features are as follows.

  • Automation: Run your support on autopilot by automating repetitive actions.
  • WhatsApp Cloud API support: Connect your WhatsApp inbox through the official WhatsApp business API.
  • Voice Recorder: Send voice notes to your customers.
  • Dark mode support in the live-chat widget.
  • Read receipts: Get read receipts on your messages.
  • Live reports: See the live view of your available agents, open conversations, and more.
  • Custom fields in the pre-chat form: To get every customer's info you need before they start a conversation with you.
  • Bulk actions for conversations: Update multiple conversations together.
  • Dashboard Apps: If you are hosting any kind of user data, say your customer orders tracking screen, on a separate URL, you can view that page directly on your Chatwoot dashboard.
  • cwctl: Our new CLI tool lets you install and manage Chatwoot on Linux VM using a single command.
  • Help Center: Build and maintain your Help Center from Chatwoot.
  • Draft replies: Chatwoot preserves your unsent messages as drafts.
  • Macros: Run a sequence of pre-defined actions in one click.
  • Campaign improvements: You can run live-chat campaigns on wild card URLs.

The first of the firsts: Events

Chatwoot Connect

We held dedicated office hours on Discord voice channels, and the participation was good. This encouraged us to host a recurring event for the community to share our updates and progress. We launched Chatwoot Connect. More than 500 people joined live on our first edition of Chatwoot Connect. For the second edition, we had our first guest speaker: Henry Lynch, the co-founder at VSimple, shared his experiences with Chatwoot.

Team offsite

At Chatwoot, we work remotely. Most of our team members stay and work close to their home town. Personal bonding and relationships take a backseat as we only meet virtually. It was important for us to have a few days together and understand the people we were working with. However, 2021 was a year of uncertainty. There were travel restrictions. People were staying indoors to reduce the risk of exposure to COVID-19. During 2022, the situation was more accommodating, and we were able to get together for our first planned offsite in March––to Goa. Heck, we shot an after-movie too!

Goals for the next year

To enable you to help your customers proactively

We want to take a step forward to proactive customer service. This would enable you to help your customers throughout their customer journeys by providing them with helpful content.

Let’s visualize it: a customer is on a page on your product and not taking any action. You could use a bot to prompt a message like: “Seems like you are having some trouble with the setup. Would these articles help you? <attach-a-link>”.

We want to begin by enabling this for a live chat since we have control over the web widget and the data we collect.

To reduce the time spent on a conversation

We want to reduce the time an agent spends on a conversation. We would take help from bots to qualify the customer query and resolve it automatically, whenever possible.

To make outbound communication easier and faster

We also want to enable companies to reach out to customers easily. Say you are experiencing downtime for a set of users. You need to quickly inform them about the same. We will build a better UX for sending outbound messages from Chatwoot. It would look something like this: Select a segment of affected customers, and click Send. 🤷‍♀️ This could also be used for making certain announcements or informing customers about product updates.

A Christmas-New Year’s gift for you 🎁

We are gifting a 25% discount on all Chatwoot subscriptions. Use code XMASCHATWOOT22 to avail.

Our inboxes are always open to talk with you. Enjoy your New Year! 🥂