A Complete Guide on In-App feedback

In the era where most of the work is done with the assistance of an app, Building the right product isn’t a cake walk. To make the time and effort put in the development of each feature worthwhile, it is important to analyze how well you match your customer requirements to the customer experience.

With so much competition, it can be hard for developers to make their apps stand out and in-app feedback can help you achieve this. It will help you understand what your customers think so you can build a customer-centric product. It helps you know better about your customer experience. 89% of companies use customer experience as the major attribute for customer loyalty and retention.

While there are several methods we can use to evaluate how well we satisfy user needs, one of the effective ones is to ask the users themselves about their experience with the product. This can easily be done by incorporating an In-app feedback tool that helps you get closer to developing a product your users want in a simple yet effective manner.

What's special in in-app feedback:

Installing and uninstalling apps are done in the blink of an eye now, you need to deliver a great customer experience to reduce the customer churn and increase the overall user satisfaction of your app.

Often, by the time users give feedback, they would’ve forgotten half of the concerns and where they wanted improvement. This is easily solved when you use in-app feedback, you constantly get ideas to optimize the product’s customer experience. But it doesn’t stop there, an in-app feedback tool also helps with identifying bugs much easier in case the report from the users isn’t clear. It makes debugging straightforward and manageable.

By consistently doing this, you deliver a smooth user experience which results in brand loyalty and user satisfaction.

Here are the top 6 reasons why you should consider implementing an in-app feedback tool in your product.

More connected with your customers:

In-app feedback is an easy way to interact more with your customers as using and giving feedback occurs in the same place. Empathy is the key to understanding user needs. When you interact more with your customers, you recognize their perspective and their needs better. When you understand them better you build products or features your customers love.

When you start interacting with your users from the onboarding process, you can avoid the risk of abandonment. 90% of the downloaded applications are deleted after the first use of the app. So when you have a better onboarding process, users get acquainted better with your application. It’s basically like a tutorial on how the app works. This will help your users to properly engage with the app in the most efficient way possible.

This onboarding process helps to get to know your users. You can identify the places where they face difficulty. With that data, developers can remove the hurdles that hinder your app and deliver a smooth performance.

Activity-based feedback data can be collected so that if a user stops the onboarding process, you can ask them why. Or, you can wait until they complete the whole process and ask them to rate their overall experience. This is a very simple, yet effective form of collecting feedback.

Customer engagement benefits you in different ways for your development. When you value your customers they contribute more in return. They spend more time, money and they might even become your brand promoters taking the adoption of your product to a higher level. Engaged customers stay loyal and will try to maintain a long-term relationship with your brand.

63% of marketers agree customer engagement helps in renewals, repeat purchases, and retention (source). 81% of companies say social customer service strategy is integrated into the overall social strategy of the organization (Source). Engagement is driven by price (81%), quality (80%) and convenience (55%), loyalty is about likability (86%) and trust (83%) (Source). Customer service interactions over Twitter have increased 250% in the last two years (Source). So engagement with your customers strengthens connectivity and helps you decide the next step of your product development. Ultimately you make your customers happy and greatly satisfied by being attentive, taking responsibility for their feedback, accomplishing them, preventing misunderstandings, avoiding excuses and so on. Gaining a moral value is more valuable than gaining revenue and this happens when you make your customers happy.

While what user problem the product solves is completely up to you initially, this changes as the time passes. We know that there are several stages to the product from innovators to the late majority, as the product moves through this stages, the user needs also evolve. If the company doesn’t keep with these needs, the user loyalty reduces and more users look for alternatives.

A good example of what happens if we failed to keep up with the user needs would be a windows phone, Windows which ranks the highest in the world PC market failed to make a mark in the mobile industry mainly because of their ignorance to user requirements. It had few apps, a low level of user-friendliness and intuitiveness. for instance, an Instagram app. Many features were not able to be operated in windows phone like it was operated in an android phone. Even app developers started to abandon windows due to the inability to generate revenues using windows mobile platform. Windows would have been a success if it had concentrated more on users.

Constantly evaluate your app performance:

Consistency becomes a critical factor in the long run. Consistently delivering quality service to your customers can be done effectively by working on their feedback as frequently as possible. When you use in-app feedback, you get feedback for the existing performance of the app routinely so that you can fix bugs and enhance the product. You can have regular meetings with your support team to know about customer’s ideas and implement them in the upcoming features. A Forrester research concentrated on the relationship between the user interface and the customer experience indicated that a better UX design returns over 400% in conversion rates. This just reinforces how important focusing on the feedback from the user is. This way you can launch your product or feature as a better one and deliver a smooth user experience.

Build robust public product roadmap:

Companies are at a huge advantage when they have public roadmaps for their users to see. It is a great way of engaging users as well as keep them updated about the planned features. A big benefit of collecting in-app feedback is that you can effectively build product roadmaps. When you make your product roadmaps public, you share the outline of your upcoming developments. This allows your customers to give scalable feedback so that you can alter your development plans according to customer feedback and structure workflows. Customers love transparency and when you give freedom to their voice, you get to know what resonates more among people. This way you can build great products and captivate a large customer base.

In-app feedback also helps in giving you enough information required for prioritizing product roadmap. You can use techniques like touch heatmaps and upvotes to know which features are highly valued by customers. This equips you to meet customer requirements and helps you deliver a meaningful customer experience.

For a promising future

We know that the best way to drive positive change is to learn from our mistakes and hear what our customers have to say. Our companies thrive off customer feedback. It helps us to innovate and disrupt, and keeps us relevant.

• Richard Branson

Usually companies and developers will get ahead of themselves. Decide what to do with their apps, start building new features on their own. Sometimes they even release batches of new features in a single update. Thinking that this is what customers will love is a mistake. Customers will feel overwhelmed and it will be detrimental to their overall experience. What we really need to do is start slow, release individual updates and test as you go.

The success strategy is having a customer feedback loop and listening to that feedback. Feedback loop is nothing but build, measure and learn. It is the key business requirement for growth and sustainability of your business. This process is valuable because 74% of people are likely to run away if they have a bad user experience or find the process too difficult. So it's crucial to have a feedback loop. And how you can close a feedback loop is by listening, analysing and acting on the feedback.

The insights gleaned from your in-app feedback will be indispensable when it comes to understanding their needs, determining which features to roll out next and to identify promoters and detractors. You will also be able to distinguish which aspects of the app are highly valued by users and which ones they don’t care for.

When you have more information on the user, it is easier to segment the information into cohorts using a feedback platform like hellonext which will help you provide deeper analysis and understanding of how your users feel when they perform a particular action. Roadmaps and upvoted will help you prioritize and refine your development process.

Example:Hellonext feedback tool

Save money

One more important reason to have in-app feedback is to save money. Nobody wants their money invested building a product or a feature to go in vain and building an app is not a cheap undertaking. The invested money has an impact over a number of factors including the platform, functionality, design, development, and your overall business model. So it's important to know what you are investing for. Investing a lot of money on a feature no one uses is a blunder.

But time and time again, creating proprietary applications is exorbitant. Modifying existing features or adding new features can be costly too, especially if these changes are purely instinctive.To overcome this challenge, collecting feedback from customers, those who have already experienced the application first-hand, will help you make meaningful changes and avoid spending unnecessary money.

User experience also plays an integral role in enhancing the overall performance. It is proved that when you have good ux, conversions rates can go upto 400%. Most cost-effective way to deliver a good user experience is to ask customers about their experience and make iterations based on that.

Feedback from In-app not only gives you a deeper understanding of the user experience, it can also help provide detailed information about user behaviors. When you invest on a feature based on customer behaviors, you not only make your investment a success but you also increase customer satisfaction. When customers feel valued they tend to recommend to a bigger crowd which will increase the overall profit of your business.

Monitor In-App performance

Continuous monitoring of your application performance is the key to success. Especially when you release new features or make major updates. It is almost inevitable that nothing can go wrong with your app’s performance. But when you keep monitoring your app’s performance you can resolve the issues sooner, and keep hold of the users of your brand.

Lean startup methodology promoted by entrepreneur Eric Ries is a way to develop businesses or products quickly and efficiently and to understand whether they are economically viable.

One of the core tenants of this approach is based on short cycles of customer feedback and improvement.

By doing this, you can continuously test the performance of your application and make any necessary changes to improve performance and overall user experience.

Can track this feedback in real time using a story you define, so once users submit their ideas, you can immediately see the filtered feedback.

These six reasons show how an in-app feedback system significantly help you build a great product. After collecting feedback, effectively analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, refining the strategy, making meaningful changes and building features your customers want will make your customers love your product. That is the type of product people will recommend others and keep coming back for.