Respond.io Scales Its Messaging Platform and Connects 10,000+ Companies with Customers on AWS

We live in an era in which consumer-facing companies cannot survive, much less thrive, without a strategic approach to communicating with customers via WhatsApp, Instagram, and other messaging applications. Companies capable of handling marketing and 1:1 conversation across major messaging channels have a strong edge over those with limited options.

Respond.io is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that helps companies manage all its customer messaging in one place. For example, a retailer may receive customer support requests and sales inquiries through a variety of messaging channels. These messages are filtered into the Respond.io platform, where customer support and sales staff can address them in an organized and efficient manner.

Furthermore, users can conduct extensive searches within chat logs to understand their customers’ needs and challenges and obtain comprehensive reports that guide strategy. Business decision-makers can explore factors like average response times, problem resolution success rates, peak hours for sales inquiries, and other business-critical data.

Respond.io was running its platform on a serverless architecture from a different cloud provider, but its founders quickly realized that the platform was not equipped to scale. In fact, users were experiencing chat log search latencies and system delays. To scale and continue to serve enterprises like Toyota, McDonald’s, and Decathlon, the company needed a reliable, flexible, and robust cloud provider.

Respond.io’s founders had experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and decided to migrate to AWS. Hassan Ahmed, CTO and cofounder of Respond.io, says, “We’re expanding our platform’s features and our user base is growing rapidly. Considering the extensive infrastructure that AWS offered, we were confident in AWS’ ability to help us scale.”

Respond.io currently stores over 1.5 TB from 2.6 billion messages in Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database. The platform also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with Amazon Athena to export these messages, facilitating efficient retrieval and minimal search latency. This gives users a way to quickly search and access customer chat logs, follow up on previous customer exchanges, and effectively manage marketing, sales, and support communications.

Respond.io also provides its customers with extensive reporting features that help them glean powerful insights from the vast amount of data created through customer messaging. Its reporting module is powered by Amazon OpenSearch Service. This means customers can obtain reports in milliseconds and analyze variables, like which messaging channels their customers prefer, peak messaging times, and additional insights that guide operations and marketing strategies.

Today, Respond.io has migrated 90 percent of its workloads to run on a serverless architecture on AWS Lambda. As a result, the companies it serves can now customize and automate workflows. Administrators can create a simple, no-code workflow that triggers an automatic response to incoming messages containing specific keywords, and they can create rules for assigning support tickets based on staff availability, time-in-queue, and many other factors.

Hassan says, “Our workflows require a sophisticated architecture, with thousands of executions running per minute. With AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, we can manage this seamlessly, without worrying about security patching and server maintenance.”