Top Ways to Engage Mobile Users and Elicit Feedback

User feedback is a tremendously valuable tool, one that allows you to continuously improve your enterprise mobile strategy and digital architecture. But before we get into the top ways to engage mobile users and elicit feedback—discussing what tools should you use and what questions you should ask in order to best elicit user feedback, first, you need to consider:

• Which stage(s) of the customer journey would benefit most from customer insights?
• Who is the targeted audience for the results of the data collected?
• What actions do you plan to take after collecting the data?
• Which digital channel(s) for collecting feedback work best for your goals?
• What initial (and ongoing) investment is required to obtain feedback from users?

With these answers in place, next ask yourself, how you should encourage your users to provide feedback. Several methods and tools exist for eliciting in-app feedback about a user’s mobile experience:

1) Helpshift – Supports the growing consumer base that prefers messaging as its primary mode of communication. Companies use their platform for boosting agent and customer loyalty by offering a) Omnichannel Messaging which provides a messaging-first support strategy via email, in-app, or web chat; b) AI-Powered Answer Bots which deliver relevant answers to customer inquiries and seamlessly transition to human agents when needed.

2) Instabug – Departs from emails and pop-ups and focuses on in-app surveys that include text field, multiple choice, or star-rating answers. Their targeted, and opt-in, survey tools, let you send surveys to specific user segments (e.g. those using a specific app version, new users, your most loyal users, etc.). This approach will catch negative comments before they reach the app stores by asking users to specify ways you can improve along with requesting they rate your app in the app stores.

3) UserVoice – Allows users to add their voice to feedback and create their own suggestions through a widget, or directly in a forum. This approach will cultivate a place where users may interact, submit feedback, peer-review ideas, and engage in ongoing dialogue. And with a forum in place, you now have a communication mechanism to champion new features, update users on the status of their requests and solicit beta feedback through targeted messages during testing.

These methods and tools are excellent ways to gain feedback for your mobile app. But this is only one piece of the puzzle. It’s most important to be proactive and engage users every step of the way: through sales, service and delivery. Some effective methods and tools for improving the quality of your feedback include:

• Leveraging User Location
  For example, Glympse provides companies with safe, temporary and private location-sharing experiences, utilizing the context of location and estimated time of arrival (ETA) data and enabling two-way communication with customers throughout the service experience. The Glympse platform improves communication and customer satisfaction while reducing customer stress, missed appointments and unnecessary calls to customer care.
• Email Surveys for New Customers or Users
  This survey is sent to new customers or users within 3 to 5 days, using tools such as SurveyMonkey. Useful when launching a new mobile application, releasing new features and functionality, or acknowledging receipt of an order. Existing customers or users should not receive the survey as they may get annoyed. One key thing to keep in mind is that negative feedback should be resolved ASAP to improve adoption and avoid damaging word-of-mouth.
• Monitor Feedback on Other Sites
  One excellent source of feedback is other websites, such as online communities, blogs, local listings, etc. Users unhappy with their experience will likely vent their frustrations on these forums. Example tools include Trackur, which tracks conversations about a brand on all platforms. Yext lets you manage local listings, including monitoring reviews and ratings. Another good tool is Google Alerts, which not only lets you monitor reviews, but also provides information on feedback about competitors.
• Time the Prompt
  While prompts are a great way to remind users to leave a review, it’s most important to time the prompts within the user experience. Don’t request a review when the user is in the midst of completing a specific use case. Rather, wait until the user has accomplished something in the app or finished an intended task.
• Use Feedback Tools that offer Mobile SDK
  A few feedback tools offer a mobile SDK (with the purpose of collecting feedback in native apps). A tool such as Mopinion captures feedback from native app users. Feedback forms may be included in a mobile app and their screenshots tool lets users select page elements they want to provide feedback on.

Now that you’ve gathered all this feedback for your mobile app, all that’s left is to make sense of it. Organize the feedback into common problems, suggestions, or even crises that demand immediate attention. Be sure to place someone in charge of being the user/customer evangelist within the company whose job it is to make sure folks are being heard and taken care of.

Customer feedback shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is one of the key components to keep your business thriving and improve the adoption of your enterprise mobile strategy. If you need any help gathering or interpreting user feedback, Propelics, and its parent company, Anexinet have many solutions in place to help you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to get you started.