Reviews are feedback. And every piece of feedback matters.

Reviews are feedback. It’s how users tell you how they’re feeling about your product or service, how they communicate their expectations. It’s a primary channel, which they use to provide information that can ultimately help your product improve and set your team in the right direction.?

So why do we see businesses not responding to reviews or even acknowledging feedback that a user has taken the time out of their day to provide?

I recently saw an example of a new app that launched very well on social media. However, users were seemingly left disappointed with the experience that followed. It got me thinking – how likely is this new app to succeed given the competitiveness in the consumer apps space and the churn rate they must be seeing based on their abysmally negative reviews on the app stores??

For this app, in particular, their brand marketing is undeniably phenomenal. They clearly know their audience and how to grab their attention online — they’ve got their targeting through social media sorted, they’re combining offline and online tactics, and are including the odd ‘stunt’ in there for good measure. However, when you head over to one of the app stores to check out their app’s product page, you are greeted with a slew of poor reviews, and an average of 2.2 stars (Google Play). The comments go along these lines:

• “the concept is good. The marketing is great! Using it is an extremely frustrating experience…every single thing I try and do in the app is just a little more annoying than it needs to be…”
• “It’s incredibly glitchy like everyone says…”
• “Somehow managed to become worse after the latest update…”
• ???“full of bugs…”

What’s more, there are hundreds of reviews and only a small handful have been responded to. The reviews left by users mostly provide very clear product feedback, with users sharing their experience of what’s happening as they open, register for an account, or try to use the app. Those reviews that got a response received a message from the Support team, but were insights from these reviews being shared with the product team, and what corrective action is being taken to resolve that user’s issue? What if they could go back and say they’ve listened to the feedback and they’ve now made available changes that have solved it? How great would that experience be for the user? As a consumer, I want to see my feedback recognized if I’m taking the time to provide my thoughts.

As a marketer, it’s great to see the level of creativity that’s gone into promoting the app. I'm a firm believer that investing in brand drives demand and they’ve balanced this well with performance marketing to get users onto the app. But this comes to nothing if there is no follow-through – product experience matters, the subscription experience matters, and the customer service experience matters. With consumer apps seeing high turnover and less brand loyalty than ever, experiences matter and everyone in the business has some role to play to provide this effectively.?

A great acquisition strategy is sure to draw users in, but if you’re churning other users your cost of acquisition will continue to increase – your performance marketing will be poor and covered well by nothing other than vanity metrics. Eventually, people stop converting when they know from the get-go they’re not going to get what they expect or hope for. If the consumer app in my example took time to understand the feedback and then act on it, they might be able to change the course of what looks like an impending disaster. This is, however, only one example. There are plenty of others that are showing a similar story.

Reviews are feedback that will ultimately help potential users decide if they want to go the effort of installing an app. Once using the app, encouraging users to leave feedback helps you to understand what annoys them, what they might want or expect in the future, where they’re getting stuck, and what they love. The more you can use these insights, the more engaged your users will be, and the more likely they are to recommend you (reducing those acquisition costs).?

If people take the time to leave a review, acknowledge it and then do something about it. You owe it to those users that are in some ways doing their bit to help you succeed.