Step back for a minute and ask how it would feel to be a customer using your apps.
Would it be easy to learn what your app does? Would it be easy to get in contact with you to find out more? Would your after-sales care be a positive experience?
In the digital era, the ability to provide a positive customer experience (CX) is widely regarded as the ‘holy grail’ for companies of all shapes and sizes. A recent eConsultancy survey showed that in both B2B and B2C firms, optimizing the customer experience is ranked as the most exciting opportunity for the organization.
For app developers in particular, providing a great CX is paramount—poor user experience or lack of support is likely to quickly lead to rejection of the app. This is true for both consumer and business-focused app developers.
Offering a great CX is not just a ‘nice to have’. According to a ROI study by Forrester, companies that were ranked as consistently providing a top quality experience by their customers between 2010 and 2014 grew around four to seven times faster than companies that received generally poor feedback for their CX.
So, measuring your CX and then using this information to make tweaks to your customer touchpoints is vital—and should bring you long-term benefits.
5 ways to help you measure your CX
Another Forrester study found that less than half of companies measure how their customers perceive their brand, and only 34% review their customer experience metrics regularly.
Given the benefits of improving your CX, it seems like a real wasted opportunity not to regularly measure how you’re doing and then use this to make improvements. The following tips should help you understand how customers view your company and your app.
1. Net Promoter Score
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index which measures how likely your customers would be to recommend your company services to their friends or work colleagues.
It’s recommended best practice to carry out an NPS survey on a quarterly basis, so you can track how perception of your brand improves (or declines) over time.
The survey should literally take your customers no more than a couple of seconds—they simply need to mark on a scale of 1-10 how likely they would be to recommend you.
If you are a B2C developer, we’d suggest issuing an NPS survey as a pop-up in your app’s home screen when the user next logs in. For B2B designers, you might find it better to send the survey as an email to existing clients, since they’ll likely be rating your company as much as the app itself.
2. Customer satisfaction survey
We’ve all filled in a customer satisfaction survey at some point.
Since it’s a little more involved, we’d recommend aiming to release this survey less regularly than the NPS, perhaps once per year. The survey need not be long, aim for five minutes’ maximum.
Ask for general points of view on your services, how helpful (or otherwise) your staff are, how much the respondent likes the app. But, also give people space to leave comments. Let them give you written feedback on how to improve or vent negative feelings. It might sting at first, but such feedback can be highly valuable.
3. Customer churn rate
The churn rate is the percentage of customers of your app that stop using the app within a given timeframe (for B2C, we recommend a quarterly measurement. For B2B, we recommend annual measurement of buyers—as in, does the buyer stay with you, or do they drop you after you built one app for their users).
If that churn rate is going down over time, you can pat yourself on the back. If it’s staying the same—or going up, then you know there’s a problem to be fixed.
4. The secret customer
This article began by asking you to imagine what it would be like to be a customer of your own app. Well, that’s exactly what a secret customer should do.
Depending on your company, you could do this in all sorts of ways. There are specialist agencies that can provide these services (for both B2C and B2B companies), you can simply ask a friend to pose as a potential customer or you can even do it yourself.
Your secret customer can provide you feedback on your marketing, on how easy it was to download and use your app, but also on the experience of working with your company. Was it easy to get answers to their questions? Were your team responsive and polite?
5. Measure your marketing touchpoints
A great CX is about consistency in all the touchpoints customers have with you—from the actual buying experience to post-sales support, as well as your marketing.
Maya is a free tool which helps you monitor the quality of three key customer touchpoints: your website, your social media presence and your company blog. By regularly reviewing how these touchpoints are performing, you can make incremental improvements right across your customer experience.
The Forrester Customer Experience Index is another tool which helps you benchmark your CX right across your market.
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