Providing excellent customer service is key to business growth—a truth widely recognised across sectors, from consumer goods to financial products–and apps are no different.

Just look at many of today’s most successful businesses—think Uber, Spotify, or Headspace—many of which are completely mobile-based, with their app being central to their business model. They are also undoubtedly customer-oriented, continually pushing to create a better customer experience for their users through their design, monetization strategy, or customer service.

While customer support for mobile businesses is just as important as for any other product, the strategy and channels used look a little different. In this piece, we’ll look at the importance of customer support in mobile, the key metrics tracked by support teams, and how they contribute to your app’s bottom line.

Why is app customer support crucial for growth?

For app-based businesses, building a successful support team is key to quickly and efficiently solve users’ issues. This will, in turn, improve brand loyalty and boost retention figures.

Mobile churn rates have never been higher, with the average mobile app losing about 77% of its Daily Active Users within the first three days after install. There are many reasons for users churning: some users may not like an app, or simply have no reason to return.

However, providing excellent customer service when users reach out is one way to build brand loyalty and increase word-of-mouth marketing. Today’s users expect their issues to be resolved at the tap of a button, and a lack of efficient customer service could convince them to uninstall your app in favor of your competitors’.

By providing an excellent user experience, you could build yourself a loyal following of users—who will then recommend your app.

Build relationships between your product and customer support teams

Support teams also have a unique outlook on the voice of the customer and the user journey. In fact, they are often likely to be the only team interacting with customers day-in, day-out—and have a wealth of knowledge about users’ personas, pain points and demands. The most successful companies are the ones that make use of this knowledge, breaking down internal silos so that support teams can actively feedback and communicate users’ needs across the company. They are also the ones using the right responding to positive reviews examples, and capitalizing on them.

Building a relationship between product and support teams is especially valuable, as user feedback can then be used to drive product decisions.

Steps you can take to improve your mobile app customer support

If you’re interested in delivering a great customer experience, try implementing these actions into your own mobile app customer support:

Treat review management as part of your customer support strategy

Customer support doesn’t just happen in your app.

An unsatisfied user will—more often than not—want to share their frustration in the most public way they can: by leaving a negative review on the app store.

Not only is it important to listen to these users’ concerns and help them to resolve their issues, as you would with any customer support ticket, but it’s especially important when dealing with public user reviews.

If you receive negative reviews and don’t act on them, or fail to spot them, they can have an impact on new prospective users deciding whether to download your app. Simply put, a negative review could be costing you new users and installs.

So what can you do? First, you’ll need a review management strategy. Clearly planning out how you categorize and respond to reviews will ensure a consistent level of customer support on your app store listing.

Next, you’ll need help automating the process with review management software. This is where we can help, our customer support automation tool allows you to:

• Address repetitive reviews automatically with auto-replies.
• Quickly identify and filter important feedback with auto-tags.
• Understand user issues in any language with auto-translation of reviews.
• Delete spammy and inappropriate reviews automatically.

Once you have your review management customer support covered, it’s time to focus on how you can provide further support in-app.

Provide your users with in-app mobile chat support

With its speed and multitasking capabilities, in-app chat support is an excellent way to help users quickly access the support they need.

With in-app chat support, your customers can contact your support team in real time to get an instant resolution. To help save the time of your support team, you could also use a bot that directs users to articles that can solve their issue.

If the user can’t answer their question with site content, they can then progress through to talking to a team member.

Prepare some saved responses to help save time

You can prepare the in-app chat function with saved responses to instantly answer your users’ questions. This won’t just save time for your customer support team, but also the user, as reading a full article can be a slow and frustrating process.

You’ll find that many users will face similar challenges and a prompt pre-programmed response will help solve the problem quickly. So, to implement saved responses, first collect all the most common questions your users have and combine them into a list.

Spend some time creating detailed responses to the issues in this list and install them into your chat support system.

Use push notifications to quickly notify your customer

Push notifications are excellent in boosting engagement and retention in your user base. But did you know your mobile app customer support can benefit from it too?

With push notifications, you can send your users targeted notifications about your campaigns. These can vary from updates about company changes, to wishing a user a happy birthday, or even celebrating a year of app usage and announcing special offers.

In addition to these uses, you can also use push notifications to send support messages or follow-ups after a user raises a concern.

When it comes to push notifications, it’s important to remember to not overdo it. If the message isn’t communicating something vital or interesting to the user, don’t message them.

Send follow-up emails to provide support outside of the app

Your follow-ups don’t have to just be push notifications. You can also follow up on issues and resolutions by email. An email can help you keep in touch with your user base outside of their phones.

After resolving their ticket, try emailing the user to see how the app is working and check whether they have encountered any challenges since.

This can help build a relationship with the user that expressed the issue and encourage them to keep returning to your app

Five Customer support KPIs you need to track 

If you want to understand more about how your support team is handling customer requests then it is best to identify the KPIs you need to track.

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT):

Short for customer satisfaction score, your CSAT attaches a numerical figure to your users’ experience—both within the app itself and externally.

There are several ways you can collect CSAT feedback, including via email, a post-service chatbot, or with an in-app survey. If using a survey, these are usually programmed and processed through the use of a third-party customer feedback tool, such as HelpShift or SurveyMonkey. Struggling with Apple Store review? Our guide has the answers you need.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS):

A Net Promoter Score looks at the likelihood of a customer recommending your service or product to a friend or colleague.

This usually takes the form of a single-question survey, and can be triggered at various points in the customer journey—for example, just after your user has interacted with your support team, or even at the end of a certain level in a mobile game. This metric is particularly helpful for forecasting business growth and cash flow.

3. Average response time:

This metric evaluates how long it takes for a ticket raised by a user to be addressed by your support team.

Average response time is often used in correlation with CSAT scores: the quicker you reply to customers, the more satisfied they will be.

When establishing your KPIs, remember different support channels also come with different expectations of response times.

4. Tickets closed:

This shows how many users’ queries have been solved, although adding more context will help paint a broader picture of your team’s success.

How long do issues normally take to resolve? Once tickets are closed, how likely are users to offer a high Net Promoter Score?

5. App store rating:

Unlike the metrics mentioned above, your app store rating is a public score—every user on the Google Play or App Store can submit a one- to five-star rating based on their experience with an app.

Your average rating acts as essential social proof for potential new users, who will quickly go to your competitors if your score isn’t up to their expectations.

Both stores also pay close attention to average ratings: AppFollow research shows that the average rating for apps and games in the stores’ top charts and featured sections hovers at around 4.5 stars. Critically, apps with a rating under 4 stars lose up to half of their potential downloads. For an app looking to gain more installs, ensuring high ratings is key to success.

Scoring highly in these metrics will have an enormous influence on your company’s north star metric: increased app revenue. Satisfied customers are much more willing to spend in-app, tolerate additional ads, or recommend your app to potential new users.

How to improve customer support KPIs

Now that we’ve looked at how quality customer support feeds into a company’s success, let’s investigate how you can help improve your support team’s metrics—particularly when responding to app reviews.

Semantic analysis and automation of customer support are two of the most common and most effective ways to do this for your app..

Customer support automation

Once you start receiving a certain number of reviews a day, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up and respond to users at scale.

One of the easiest ways to manage a big increase in user reviews is through automation. You can usually do this through a third-party platform, where you’ll be able to:

• Set certain rules to automatically reply to messages
• Automatically report offensive or spammy reviews
• Use auto-tags to group similar responses together

All of this will help your team save hours of work, reply more promptly to customers, and allow them to focus on business-critical reviews and improving your users’ experience.

For more on how to manage user reviews at scale via automation, head over to our Automation Guide.

Understanding user feedback

Beyond replying to reviews, support teams also need to keep a finger on the pulse of customers’ problems and expectations. This offers the entire company important insights on performance, and can help mold future app versions. But manually sorting through reviews to find those that offer genuine insight can be slow and ineffective, especially when you’re receiving hundreds or thousands of reviews a week.

Semantic analysis tools provide an easy way to keep track of user reviews at scale: powerful machine learning algorithms can analyze hundreds of reviews within seconds, grouping similar subjects together, and providing a 360 degree overview of sentiment analysis and current hot topics within your user community.

Semantic analysis is key to helping you:

• Gain a deep understanding of your users and their pain points
• Keep track of new bugs within your app
• Expand internationally—helping you evaluate app performance by country or language

Digging into your users’ issues and integrating their feedback into your product roadmap are two key ways of improving their customer experience—and will help you continue to innovate and improve.

Use Semantic Analysis and automation to optimize your workflow

With AppFollows Semantic Analysis tool you can easily find feature requests and bug reports in your app store reviews, and then inform your users once the issues have been fixed.

In fact, by combining it with automation, you can automate up to 90% of your review management, meaning you can reply to users faster than ever before.

Spend less time on admin and more time answering critical feedback, improving your app, and attracting new users with AppFollow’s help. And don't forget to tackle 5 star review responses with the best templates, too.