Collecting User Feedback for your Mobile App
Collecting User Feedback for your Mobile App
Listen to your customers! It's the right thing to do!
Collecting user feedback is a crucial task when managing a mobile app. In this week’s newsletter, I will share how you can collect user feedback and how you can do it in order to make your mobile app thrive.
Hi 👋, Rommel here! Welcome to this week's newsletter. Each week I share some tips and knowledge about mobile product management. Did you miss last week’s post? Here’s the post from last week:
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How’s the holiday for you? I hope it’s been great. By the way, 2022 is coming to an end it’s been a good year and this is my last post for this year hope you like it.
First thing first, before we jump in right at the ways on how we can gather user feedback, we gotta step back a little and know why it is necessary to collect it and what we need to do before collecting user feedback.
Why collect feedback?
As you may know as a product manager listening to your customers is essential to understand your users. Aside from talking to them directly, another way of doing this is to collect user feedback. Listening to your customers is very crucial because their the one who is using your app in the first place, you’re gonna know how your product is being used, what works well, what can be improved, or if there’s something wrong with the app. And they are the ones you need to satisfy remember?
Reasons why it is important to collect feedback in summary:
It can help you improve the product
You can enhance user satisfaction
Listening to customers can build trust and credibility
Feedback can spark new ideas for innovation
You can make sure your product remains competitive
Before collecting feedback
Before collecting user feedback you need to set an objective first. Defining the objective will give you clarity on what way or how you will gather user feedback, don’t just collect feedback blindly and with no goal, that is a mistake.
The second thing I need to mention is don’t be afraid to do experiments. Whenever you’re getting low feedback results try changing your approach. Doing this will help you get more valuable feedback in the long run.
Now on to the fun part, ways on how you can gather user feedback.
Ways to gather feedback
✴ Asking for a LIKE
Yep, Just ask them in-app if they 👍 the app or not. Very simple right? That’s the point. With this simple question, you can easily verify if your users like your app or not. You can do a follow-up if they answer yes (like) you can ask them to write you a review on the app store or google play store if not you can redirect or prompt a very simple text box and ask them why they are not liking the app. With this very simple approach, you can easily gather feedback with ease.
✴ Ratings and Reviews
This method is almost the same as asking for a like in your app. The difference here is you’re gonna ask your user to rate by scale instead of a very simple yes or no (asking for a like). The most common use to represent the scale is a star rating. Both the Apple app store and Google Playstore use this method. You can do this in-app or you can redirect them to the app store.
Take note, redirecting to the store can both positively and negatively affect your store listing. Unlike doing it in-app, all the feedback will be contained in your system. Both have advantages and disadvantages. If you’re not confident enough with your product I suggest doing it in-app, if you’re confident enough or best if you already achieved product-market fit it’s best that you redirect them.
✴ In-App NPS
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric that measures the likelihood that a customer will recommend your product or service to others. NPS is a very common and simple way to measure customer satisfaction. It’s almost the same with the ratings, this is a scale as well the difference is by default NPS scale is 0 to 10, with higher scores indicating a higher likelihood your users recommend your app to others.
To calculate the NPS, the percentage of detractors is subtracted from the percentage of promoters. The result is a score between -100 and 100, with a higher score indicating more positive customer loyalty. To learn more visit this link.
Oh and by the way, if you’re pursuing this route I suggest you read this first:
✴ In-App QUICK Survey Forms
The good old survey is still powerful in understanding sentiment, but only if they’re shown at the right place and at the right time in-app. By asking targeted questions, survey forms can help you and your team understand the needs and preferences of your users. By using this method you can customize to collect specific types of data or feedback. This allows you to focus on the areas that are most important to your users and gather more targeted and actionable data.
Oh by the way did you notice the upper case “QUICK” word on the header? Your survey form should be not long or else your users will not finish it. And you must strategically show it in the right place and at the right time and that’s the key.
✴ Beta Tests
Beta testing is a program where you invite users to try and test unreleased apps. In this way, you can learn how users feel about your apps, and you can gain insight into the user experience, especially before the official full release. Most of the beta users of your app are the ones who think they will benefit most from your product.
✴ Communities / Support Channels
Even though your product is on mobile it doesn’t mean you should do everything on it. Another great way to collect feedback is from the communities. Most of the time this is where your users are voicing out their issues, their praises, or even questions. Knowing this, you gotta engage them to learn more this is another smart way of collecting feedback from your users. Some examples are below:
Social Media
Emails
Phone Support Calls
Forums
What to do with the feedback
After setting the objectives and collecting the feedback all you need to do now is analyze all the data. From there you can get an overview of what are the possible issues in your app or a new idea might come up based on the user’s feedback. Always remember your users’ voice is very important especially as a mobile PM you’re the voice of the users in your team. You gotta analyze it, and learn from it and you can now make data-informed decisions based on the data that you collected.
Additional things and important reminders
Now that you’ve got the collection of feedback part and you now know what to do with it I need to add some pointers and important things to remember when executing this activity.
✴ Right place and the right time
Asking for feedback at the right place and the right time is one of the most important things you need to do when collecting user feedback. Do not show it in random or unrelated places, for example, if you have an e-commerce app and you can ask for feedback about their checkout experience after your user checkouts, or if you have an on-demand delivery service then your user suddenly stops requesting the service you can ask for feedback.
✴ Personalize the response
When sending an email response to your users on their feedback as much as possible don’t make it a generic response. Sending personalized responses to your users after giving their feedback is a great way to let your users know that you really heard their feedback and will do something about it. It’s a different feeling when you receive a generic response rather than a personalized response, this can also increase user trust and loyalty when you do this.
✴ Feedback UX
The last thing that you need to keep in mind when asking for feedback is the user experience. Yep, it’s still part of the process, you don’t want to make it hard for your users to send feedback, or else you will not get any. Make it simple as possible and don’t make it too long or else they will abandon your survey. Don’t forget to tell them why you’re doing it.
Conclusion
One more tip: Feedback from users can also be used to inform marketing efforts and help target the right audience for the app. By understanding what users like and dislike about the app, the development team can create marketing messages that resonate with the target audience.
These are just some ways you can do but there are plenty more ways how you can gather feedback. These methods are great for mobile apps, and if implemented correctly, they can be really useful and really effective.
What do you think? Did I miss something? Do you have another way of collecting feedback for a mobile app? Let me know in the comments.
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Until next week, Thank you for reading! Have a great week! oh and advance Happy new year!!!
