The Art of Harnessing App Feedback
App feedback is essential in all app building because it is important to create an app your users will love and prevent churn. Companies such as unitQ are leading the field in analyzing app user feedback by making it easier to search, monitor and analyze feedback with its AI platform.
Why do you need feedback? Why is feedback critical?
In-app user experience will make or break your retention funnel. A well-executed feedback loop and player support can guarantee app longevity and drive financial success. Feedback will help your developers build better games and QA can more quickly replicate bugs, while support staff better addresses user frustration.
Feedback, like any other measure used to determine the success of your app, allows you to test the performance of your app. How your app performs correlates directly with your customers’ satisfaction and LTV (lifetime value). To make sure your app is satisfactory to your customer, gather qualitative data and insights directly from your users.
Feedback is also critical because it allows you to build a high-quality product in the testing phase and allows you to receive positive app reviews from the moment the app is published to the app stores. It minimizes the risk of your app having bugs and glitches. Not only can feedback be used before your app is even published, but it can also be used to gather real-time feedback after launch and share concerns/glitches as they happen with your product team so they can be fixed as soon as possible.
How to Best Collect Mobile App Feedback
It’s never easy to receive negative feedback, but it’s even harder when you are trying to locate your product feedback online. The most difficult type of feedback is silence. As a matter of fact, the most under-reported player issue types are bugs, errors, and crashes. This is because players cannot report the problem to you if their game is frozen. Players may also go back to their game as soon as possible without reporting the bugs, because it might be too hard or time-consuming to provide feedback or instead uninstall your app because they are frustrated.
When feedback gets complicated it requires an effort for the tester or the user to submit feedback, reducing the likelihood to submit the feedback accurately. In-app feedback ensures that more app feedback is collected accurately and makes it a smoother process. Platforms like Helpshift’s free Feedback+ SDK and unitQ collect and filter feedback and allow you to enhance your product quality. Feedback+ SDK gathers feedback in-app (benefiting from all the meta-data associated) while unitQ aggregates feedback from public (app stores, social) and private sources (support tickets, support chats, surveys). There will always be people leaving feedback outside the app, so unitQ is the platform that gathers that feedback holistically.
To collect better mobile app feedback you must collect feedback with more context. Dig deep to gather information on metadata such as languages, regions, devices, and platforms. Quality feedback covers all the bases like what a user is doing in the app, who they are, where they were in the app during feedback collection, and what devices they use. All these targeted feedback points are important to create a big picture on why or why not your app is successful and allows you to create an action plan based on the data. To gather quality feedback you need to collect feedback outside of your app too. Users may leave reviews on social media, forums, or discord, and missing out on them could lead to a missed opportunity to improve your app.
While collecting app feedback is important, it is just as important to know when the best time to collect feedback is. Make sure you solicit input at the appropriate time. You don’t want to scare a user off by prompting them with a feedback request pop-up the second they get to the app. It is best to request feedback until they have been active on the app for a while or if there is inactivity. Regarding app reviews, you want to avoid prompting your users after a negative in-app occurrence to avoid having a public negative rating.
How to Categorize Feedback and Sort Feedback so You Can Learn From it
Helpshift uses smart views to filter user insights into folders by platform, app title, issue status, assignee, tags, and custom issue fields. Our Feedback+ SDK comes with access to Helpshift’s basic dashboard that organizes feedback using customizable tags and smart views. Metadata is collected including mobile platform, feedback category, rating, email ID, and any additional feedback provided by the user. Also, the device model, application version, operating system, network type, and country code is collected automatically. Feedback+ SDK also contains a feedback collection bot that organizes feedback using customizable categories like mobile platform type, feedback type, and any additional tags you want to add. These features make it easy for your team to share information cross-departmentally and collaborate.
How to Harness App Feedback to Take Action and Improve Your App?
You must be able to analyze the constant flow of incoming feedback data, as well as the ability to take quick action and share the knowledge internally across teams to address and resolve issues. To make it easier to monitor what users say about your product or game in real-time, send user reviews, product quality issues, or quality trends to specific teams in your organization via Slack, Jira, or PagerDuty.
The first step to harnessing app feedback is to analyze the results. After analyzing your feedback data, decide what problem areas you want to focus on. Learning how to prioritize what matters most is key to the success of your app.
For a mobile app to have the success you are looking for, you must take into consideration all aspects of app feedback. To create an app that users are happy with, it is necessary to first understand what they like and don’t like about the app and then come up with a plan to fix it. By fixing things, looking at feedback, and taking action you expect to increase retention. In fixing retention you improve KPIs. Overtime, acting fast on user feedback will lead to more user acquisition because you’re making your users happier, increasing the chance for them to refer other people to come to your app, and write better reviews.
