By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —
The customer experience you provide is one of the most important factors in maintaining the integrity of your brand. This is true no matter what your offering is and no matter the customer channel—especially mobile. For a website, if your customers can't accomplish what they've set out to do, you can measure the negative repercussions through metrics like CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score). For mobile applications, however, if a customer doesn't have a great experience, you see the results in a much more public way—the user ratings in an application store or marketplace.
Like CSAT and NPS, negative feedback on an app shows what people think of your offering. However, there's a much more causal effect from poor rankings in an app store or marketplace. Negative ratings there translate almost immediately to lost opportunity. That's because low ratings dictate your standings in the store. The coveted spotlight of a store's top 25 list shines on only those applications that are downloaded the most, and you can bet those are the ones that have high ratings and satisfied customers. With your app poorly rated and buried at the bottom, you open the door for competitors to swoop in and steal your mobile traffic.
To ensure that you stay head and shoulders above your competitors in the mobile channel, it's increasingly important to stay in-tune with your customer experience and find ways to make ongoing improvements in that area. Remember, the expectations are very high for mobile apps. Your customers expect them to let them do almost anything from anywhere. So when you provide a customer experience that falls short of their lofty expectations, your customers will opt instead for one that doesn't. Know the pain points in your mobile application, which devices it accommodates, and where your app works and where it doesn't. Understanding and preventing failure in these areas will eliminate the frustration your customers will have when they need your app the most—such as when making last-minute reservations from a cab, purchasing groceries while on the bus, or buying tickets to a sold-out game while waiting in line. When your mobile customers expect such convenience, the last thing they want to see is an error message that asks them to log on to the website. Rather than sharing their feedback directly to you, they'll share it much more publicly—and that's where the trouble really begins.
The customer experience you provide is one of the most important factors in maintaining the integrity of your brand. This is true no matter what your offering is and no matter the customer channel—especially mobile. For a website, if your customers can't accomplish what they've set out to do, you can measure the negative repercussions through metrics like CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score). For mobile applications, however, if a customer doesn't have a great experience, you see the results in a much more public way—the user ratings in an application store or marketplace.
Like CSAT and NPS, negative feedback on an app shows what people think of your offering. However, there's a much more causal effect from poor rankings in an app store or marketplace. Negative ratings there translate almost immediately to lost opportunity. That's because low ratings dictate your standings in the store. The coveted spotlight of a store's top 25 list shines on only those applications that are downloaded the most, and you can bet those are the ones that have high ratings and satisfied customers. With your app poorly rated and buried at the bottom, you open the door for competitors to swoop in and steal your mobile traffic.
To ensure that you stay head and shoulders above your competitors in the mobile channel, it's increasingly important to stay in-tune with your customer experience and find ways to make ongoing improvements in that area. Remember, the expectations are very high for mobile apps. Your customers expect them to let them do almost anything from anywhere. So when you provide a customer experience that falls short of their lofty expectations, your customers will opt instead for one that doesn't. Know the pain points in your mobile application, which devices it accommodates, and where your app works and where it doesn't. Understanding and preventing failure in these areas will eliminate the frustration your customers will have when they need your app the most—such as when making last-minute reservations from a cab, purchasing groceries while on the bus, or buying tickets to a sold-out game while waiting in line. When your mobile customers expect such convenience, the last thing they want to see is an error message that asks them to log on to the website. Rather than sharing their feedback directly to you, they'll share it much more publicly—and that's where the trouble really begins.
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