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Stephen King
Stephen King is CEO of Mob4Hire.com, the world's largest mobile app market research and testing crowd-sourced community focused on making mobile applications better.
Read the full biography here |
Fear The One Star
By Stephen King - 10th November '09
Understanding the dimensions of Customer Loyalty is a primary market research requirement for many software companies. I've worked with my good friend, Dr. Bob Hayes, Ph.D., www.businessoverbroadway.com , on many occasions, as his customer loyalty science is the best in the business. As a quick primer, Dr. Hayes defines customer loyalty in three dimensions; Retention, Advocacy and Purchasing:
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Retention: Would you buy this app from us again? (Measuring defection rate/churn as it relates to the lifetime customer value)
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Advocacy: Would you recommend this app? (Measuring referrals to friends and colleagues as it relates to the increased size of the customer base)
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Purchasing: Would you buy additional/different apps from us? (Measuring purchasing behavior as it relates to increased number of purchases) |
Measuring, understanding and improving these 3 dimensions of customer loyalty gives firms an opportunity to exponentially grow their revenue 3 ways.
Nowhere is the effect of customer loyalty played out more immediately than on the battlefield of mobile apps. According to the AdMob July Mobile Metrics Report tinyurl.com/lzy6k9 , 69% of apps are discovered and selected based on their quality; either through browser through top store rankings, searching for specific types of apps, or word of mouth.
My hypothesis, based on extensive anecdotal evidence, is that if a mobile app has 1 star reviews, then subsequent downloads/purchases of that app will simply not occur.
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'My hypothesis, based on extensive anecdotal evidence, is that if a mobile app has 1 star reviews, then subsequent downloads/purchases of that app will simply not occur. |
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In short, one star reviews will kill revenue growth. Fear The One Star!!!!
That being said, as I was writing this article, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how many stars are generally acceptable before people consider downloading and/or purchasing an app. I started this really-quick-poll (see to the right of this article), and if you wouldn’t mind voting, we can quickly collect and view that stat.
At Mob4Hire, we speak extensively on “User Feedback Techniques for Make Great Mobile Software.” For example, we gave a talk at SEE 2009 in London a couple of weeks ago: www.scribd.com . When I come to the part where I ask “Why is it important to have user feedback BEFORE you release an app?,” I always chuckle … this seems sooo basic to me, and yet so often overlooked in the mobile app development cycle.
Now, a big part of this is having access to users for testing, feedback and market research purposes. In the mobile landscape, the walled gardens of the network operators makes it VERY difficult and expensive to access users and handsets … unlike traditional and web software, mobile firms often do not have a direct relationship with their users (or targeted users). In fact, addressing this problem is one of the basic fundamentals of the Mob4Hire business model with our global community of testers.
Having been in the software industry for over 25 years, and knowing the importance of user feedback through any development cycle, I am amazed at how many developers miss the point of including user feedback when creating mobile apps. The mobile development cycle right now is really one of “hurry up, get it done, there finished, now release it to an app store” followed by “I wonder why it’s not selling?”In other words, a goldrush with no gold.
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The mobile development cycle right now is really one of “hurry up, get it done, there finished, now release it to an app store” followed by “I wonder why it’s not selling?” |
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I have a further hypothesis that developers have been trained in “continuous improvement” over the last several years in user feedback cycles through Agile development methodologies for SaaS cloud computing web apps. Agile’sintent is to get v 0.9 to market as soon as possible, collect user feedback on an ongoing basis, prioritize, fix and release in 3 or 4 week cycles. Agile is a good web development process, and, in fact, we take this approach ourselves at www.Mob4Hire.com .
However, in mobile apps, developers do not have that luxury. It’s like the old days when we shipped software on these things we called “Floppy Disks” … once users receive and install the software, getting patches and upgrades to them was painful. And, in the case of a 1 star mobile app, I suspect most users simply wouldn’t even bother updating their app, as they would have already deleted and moved on to the next thing.
After posting their 1 star review in the app stores, of course.
The lesson that anyone in a product management / market research role can take away from this is “1 star” conversations are happening everywhere your clients can talk to each other about your products and services. I hope my words serve as a reminder of the importance of word-of-mouth not just for viral marketing purposes, but as a tool to bring user feedback back into the development process of the products and services of the companies for which you work.
Stephen King
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