Common Measurement Mistakes: Volume 2

Posted on June 18, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

Welcome back. In this ForeSee Blog series, I’ve been talking about some common measurement mistakes we see across the industry. You can read Volume 1 here, and I also recommend reading some previous posts such as Confusing Causation and Correlation and Confusing Measurement with Feedback, which are also common mishaps when measuring the customer experience.

Below are a few more:

Common Measurement Mistake: Forgetting the Real Experts are Your Customers

Experts, like usability groups, have their place. But who knows customer intentions, customer needs, and customer attitudes better than actual customers? When you really want to know, go to the source. It takes more time and work, but the results are much more valuable. I cannot say how many times I have been in meetings with analysts and experts who swear that a new site navigation system will solve every problem on a particular website. (Oddly enough, there often is money to be made if the analysts are hired to develop that new navigation system. Unfortunately solutions are often based on what the expert can provide rather than what the customer needs.) Meanwhile, what customers want are more product varieties to choose from. Experts and consultants certainly have their place, but their advice and recommendations must be driven by customer needs as much if not more than by organizational needs.

Common Measurement Mistake: Gaming the System

Unfortunately many feedback and measurement systems create bias and inaccuracy. How? Ask the wrong people, bias their decisions, or give them incentives for participation. Measuring correctly means creating as little measurement bias as possible while generating as little measurement noise as possible.

common measurement mistakesTry to avoid incentivizing people to complete surveys, especially when there is no need. Never ask for personal data; some customers will decline to participate if only for privacy or confidentiality concerns.

Also never measure with the intent to prove a point. Unfortunately, research run by internal staff can often contain some amount of built-in bias. As employees we may, however unintentionally, create customer measurements to prove our opinions are correct or support our theories, but to what end?

Customer measurements must measure from the customers’ perspective and through the customers’ eyes, not through a lens of preconceived views.

Next week, in Volume 3 of Common Measurement Mistakes, I will discuss how Sampling Problems, Faulty Math, and Keep it Simple – Too Simple are common mistakes when measuring the customer experience.

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Highly Satisfied B2B Customers More Likely to Recommend, Use Again

Posted on June 13, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

There are many, many differences between B2Bs and B2Cs. But if you look closely you will see many commonalities as well. For one thing, online customer satisfaction plays a key role in one just as much as it does in the other.

The benchmark we released today reflects more than 15,500 surveys collected just in the month of May for 33 B2B sites large and small (such as Cummins, Eaton, Emerson Network Power, Gale-Cengage, HNI Enterprise, MSC Industrial Supply, Praxair, ProQuest, and Scholastic).

Here’s what we found. Based on likelihood scores, highly-satisfied B2B website customers report being:

  • 67% more likely than less satisfied customers to return to the website.
  • 79% more likely to purchase in the future.
  • 133% more likely to recommend the website to a friend.

When you look at the overall B2B industry average of 64 there is clearly some work to be done in this space compared to the ForeSee Website Index that indicates the average customer satisfaction for all websites hovered around 70 in May of this year.

Satisfied B2B Customers are more likely to recommend, returnBut if you look at the range of individual scores (26 to 86) you can see that some B2B organizations are doing a very good job at meeting (and in some cases even exceeding) their customers’ expectations, wants, and needs. Unfortunately, some are not.

This is where benchmarking can be very beneficial. It offers companies, whether measured in this study or not, the opportunity to see where they stack up in the industry. But it shouldn’t stop there.

If you’re a B2B organization and you want to make your customers more likely to return to the website, to purchase, and to recommend…you should measure the experiences your customers are having with your company. If done right you can then focus on what elements are most important to customers and make improvements that will have the greatest impact on improving the customer experience. You’ll then see a definite difference in your bottom line.

How do you measure the success of your B2B website? How do you benchmark against competitors? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Ann Arbor Relay for Life

Posted on June 12, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

After wrapping up one exciting event, our annual Summit, we move onto many more including one of my favorite – the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life.

This year will mark ForeSee’s third year participating in the local Ann Arbor event, and my family and I have been supporting it for many years prior to our involvement as a company.  For those of you who are not familiar with Relay For Life, it is a life-changing event that gives people and communities around the world a chance to celebrate the lives of people who have battled cancer, remember loved ones lost, and fight back against the disease.

Unfortunately, most of us have been touched in one way or another by this horrible disease.  I lost my father to cancer a number of years ago.  Hopefully we can all help support this cause and put an end to cancer.

ForeSee participates in the Ann Arbor Relay for LifeForeSee has once again made the decision to sponsor this event which will be held this year at Washtenaw Community College on June 22nd and 23rd.  This is a great way for ForeSee to give back and help others.

Through an incredible effort last year by our employees, their families, and you, we raised a final total of $15,775.87.  This year we would like to surpass that number by raising at least $16,000.  So far we are off to a great start, but still have a long way to go and hope you can join the ForeSee family in the fight by either donating or participating in the event. Remember, every little bit helps.

To donate or join our team, go to our team website.

I want to personally thank each of you in advance for your efforts in supporting this great cause, and I am confident that together we can surpass our 2013 goal.

Together we can make a significant impact against this disease.

I hope to see you at the relay.

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Missing Out on the Summit

Posted on June 11, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

Leaving a few weeks for the dust to settle from the very active and very fulfilling ForeSee Summit last month, I’ve had chance to look back and realize what a tremendous event it really was for a variety of reasons.

As much as it is an event for our customers, seeing the Summit unfold is really a milestone for our company. We see that yet another year has passed, and we see the success and growth of not only ForeSee but also the growth of the data and how analytics are used in organizations. The thing I probably noticed the most was how customer experience analytics continues to rise higher in organizations. Business executives are beginning to realize the full potential of predictive analytics in helping them make strategic decisions as well as operational and tactical improvements.

Missing the 2013 ForeSee SummitThe Summit affords us the opportunity to see our customers engaged, listen to their stories, hear how they use our products, and watch them networking jointly amongst themselves and with our staff. We also get to hear directly from our customers about how they overcame hurdles and challenges in their organizations, whether it was getting executive buy-in, or figuring out how to present the data, or what they need to be thinking about next. In retrospect, we learn just as much as our clients do.

It’s also great to give all of our employees an opportunity to witness part of the Summit. While some of our employees are customer-facing, many are not. And for them to see our customers in action, talking about ForeSee and how they use customer experience analytics is huge benefit to our employees individually and to the company as a whole. Making our company better makes our clients better.

And if you didn’t make it in 2013, and I mean this in the best possible way, but, you missed out on a lot.

You missed not only the interaction with the ForeSee team, but building relationships with your peers and hearing real life stories about how different companies are utilizing their data to move themselves forward, move their companies forward, and move the customer experience forward. I have to say that hearing it firsthand gives it a sense of purpose and reality that we can’t even begin to replicate.

You missed hearing about our product road map, and the opportunity to give us input into what you see as the next set of challenges (something we want to hear regardless through any mechanism possible and at any time). You missed the discussion about what is next in the world of customer satisfaction analytics. You missed industry leaders such as Eric Peterson and Joyce Hrinya. You missed Billy Beane’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – never have I heard such an applicable example of using analytics to gain a competitive advantage and doing it at such a low cost.

You missed the fun. The networking. Dinner at the University of Michigan’s football stadium, “The Big House.” You missed UofM football coach Lloyd Carr – the third winningest coach in the university’s history – telling great stories about leadership and making decisions we are all faced with every day.

We added about 100 new clients in the 12 months leading up to this year’s Summit. If you fell into that category you may have missed out the most.

Measuring the customer experience can be transformational in how your business makes or will make decisions. And while we do our best to impart upon you our capabilities and how you can use your data to the fullest, there isn’t anything more impactful than hearing it from other customers, especially from those who are one, or two, or five years ahead of you in their transformation.

When measurement is done correctly it is a continuous transformation of utilizing the voice of customer as a compliment to all the other KPIs and metrics you have in order to understand your success, to identify your opportunities and weaknesses, and to make better decisions.

That was the 2013 ForeSee Summit. If you missed it you simply missed getting to know us better.

The bright side is that there’s always next year. Don’t miss out. See you in 2014.

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What the ForeSee Summit had “In Store” for Attendees

Posted on June 7, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Randy Kish

By Randy Kish

With so much focus on the web and especially, as of late, mobile touch points, little attention is drawn to the store front. However, Stores remain a crucial part of the customer experience. And at this year’s ForeSee User Summit the Store Measurement Breakout session turned out to be standing-room-only.  The session featured two speakers who shared success stories of how they used customer experience analytics to provide both strategic and operational decision support in their store operations.

I’ve decided to blind the case studies to protect the anonymity of our clients and their business objectives and strategies.

Case Study 1

In the first segment, specialty retailer, Client A, shared how company leaders had embraced customer feedback in their company culture for 10 years. They started with postcard feedback that evolved into an online survey.   Although they were collecting data and scores, they had no insight as to how to drive improvements.  To remedy the situation, the organization’s leaders selected ForeSee’s predictive analytics as their go-to customer experience measurement tool, going live with their store measurement in October, 2012.  Team leaders executed a well-orchestrated transition plan that first introduced their executives to ForeSee’s scores and analysis and soon after phased it into the stores operation.

Their initial Satisfaction Insight Review (SIR) revealed that customers who were assisted by a store representative had significantly higher satisfaction scores. In particular, those customers had higher satisfaction scores with price than anticipated, which supported a major strategic decision to eliminate their price-matching policy.

A deeper dive into the data demonstrated that there were aspects of employee training and customer awareness that could help transition customers to the new pricing policy.  So Client A tweaked their customer communications and training whereby the change was implemented without an impact on overall customer satisfaction.

A few other takeaways included:

  • Use your Analyst; use your Analyst; use your Analyst – they may not know everything (who really does) all of the time, but they do know best a majority of the time
  • Change your custom questions to gain continuous insight
  • Share data in internal communications to highlight key takeaways

ForeSee Satisfatction Analytics for Store Measurement

Case Study 2

Client B, a multi-channel retailer, equated the first time they turned on ForeSee analytics to “opening the floodgates of consumer data.” That may sound overwhelming, but having a good process in place to execute on the insights and openly communicating the results was key to a successful implementation.

Part of that good process is having a good analyst at the helm to steer them through the data deluge. Like most of our clients, they highly value the relationship with their Satisfaction Research Analyst (SRA). SRAs are in a unique position in which they provide a clear voice that is emotionally separate and unbiased from business leaders and established objectives, and provide a neutral platform for discussion that is both independent and scientific.  In their SIRs, Client B’s analyst spends a lot of time helping them understand where exactly they can get the most money for their investment.

Some recent key wins included operational level changes to visual merchandising, retraining store employees on suggestive selling of similar style items, and standard operating procedures to fulfill desired out-of-stock items.  Each of these resulted in improvements in overall satisfaction and future behavior likelihoods such as return, purchase next time, and recommend to a family member, friend, or colleague.

Other key takeaways from this client included:

  • Review actions taken from the previous recommendations to see the wins
  • Have a well-defined process to create action items, commit to it, and execute the plan
  • Measure the results, see the impact.  (i.e. tie to transactional data)

All in all, this breakout session was one of the Summit highlights, and we’ll look forward to similar stories from even more clients next year.

Key takeaway:

Don’t miss the 2014 ForeSee Summit!

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Common Measurement Mistakes: Volume 1

Posted on June 4, 2013 1 Comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

We all need a methodology.  But simply having a methodology does not guarantee success.

What is a methodology?  A methodology is often just a system of measurements accompanied by an acronym.  Nowhere is it said a methodology must to be accurate, precise or reliable.  There are “methodologies” on the market today with margin of error rates in the double digits, but I have no doubt the people using them still have confidence in those methodologies.

Common Measurement Mistakes include not using an accurate, precise, and reliable methodologyA truly useful methodology is accurate, precise, and reliable.  Otherwise the methodology is garbage in, garbage out.  Inaccurate and imprecise methodologies lead to poor decisions – and to a false sense of confidence in those decisions.

The way I see it, there are 11 common measurement mistakes. I’ve already explored a few of them in previous posts such as Confusing Causation and Correlation and Confusing Measurement with Feedback. Through the next few posts I will talk about the remaining nine.

Common Measurement Mistake: Drawing Conclusions from Incomplete Information

Every day, your business generates a tremendous amount of data – but that data may not tell the full story.  Let’s say your analytics show visitors spend a relatively high amount of time on a particular page.  Is that page great – or is it problematic?  Maybe visitors simply love the content.  Or, maybe they are getting stuck due to a problem with the page.

Possibly your call center statistics show average call time has decreased.  Is a decrease in average call time good news or bad news?  When calls end more quickly, costs go down, but have you actually satisfied callers or left them disgruntled, dissatisfied, and on their way to your competition?  Without additional information to help better evaluate the data, you simply cannot know.

Never draw conclusions from any statistical analysis that does not tell the whole story.

Common Measurement Mistake: Failing to Look Forward.

Every company seeks to look forward, and measuring customer satisfaction after an activity or transaction is certainly helpful, but what if you also want to better predict the future?  Measuring customer satisfaction by itself will not provide the best view forward.  Using a complete satisfaction measurement system – including future behaviors and predictive metrics such as likelihood to return to the site or likelihood to purchase again – generates leading indicators that complement and illuminate lagging indicators.

Common Measurement Mistake: Assuming a Lab is a Reasonable Substitute.

Usability groups and observation panels are certainly useful and have their place; the problem is the sample sizes are small and the testing takes place in a controlled environment.  Say you bring people into a lab and tell them what you want them to do.  Does that small group of eight participants represent your broader audience?  Does measuring and observing them when they do what we tell them to do provide the same results as real users who do what they want to do?  Observation is helpful, but applying science to the voice of customer and measuring the customer experience through the lens of customer satisfaction is critical to success.

Next week I take a look at two other common measurement mistakes: Forgetting the Real Experts are Your Customers and Gaming the System.

See you there.

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Banking on Mobile

Posted on June 3, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Eric Feinberg

By Eric Feinberg

Like most consumers in most industries today, banking consumers are becoming more and more mobile.

A March 2013 study from Juniper Research indicated that mobile banking users will exceed 1 billion (yes, that’s with a “B”), representing 15% of global mobile handset users, by 2017. And to make even more interesting, the UK research company also stated that around 19% (about 200 million) will turn to tablet use – which should be considered an entirely different experience from traditional (smartphone) mobile – for their banking transactions by 2017.

Banking on MobileThis shift to mobile brings higher expectations for more convenient and easily accessible mobile service offerings from their banks, credit unions and investment firms. But it is important to ensure that the mobile experience you provide, regardless of it being smartphone or tablet, is what the customer wants and expects. Last year (October 2012), Google reported that 1 in 6 people who switched banks said a poor mobile banking experience prompted the search for a new banking entity.

Last week, ForeSee released its 2013 Financial Services Benchmark that reported on the online customer satisfaction of the industry as a whole as well as by segments such as credit unions, banks, lending organizations, and investment firms among others. The aggregate score for financial services in general is at 72 on ForeSee’s 100-point scale.

When we look strictly at mobile, the average customer satisfaction for financial mobile sites and applications is at 82, a superior score that shows customers in general are highly satisfied with financial mobile experiences.

More importantly, when we compare future behaviors scores of highly satisfied mobile banking customers (those scoring 80 or higher) to those who were less satisfied (a score of 69 or lower), we see the value of a satisfied customer. Highly satisfied mobile users are 41% more likely than less-satisfied users to recommend the company to a friend, family member or colleague, and are 78% more likely to use mobile again as a means of engaging with the company.

Financial services companies that are measuring their mobile customer experience and making the necessary changes will be better able to serve as a valuable and trusted partner to their customers than organizations that don’t.

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Using Data to Impact Usability Efforts

Posted on May 31, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Lija Hogan

By Lija Hogan

Usability is an essential piece in the optimization of the customer experience puzzle.

The ForeSee Usability Services group defines Usability as:

The measure of how well an interface (web, mobile, app, etc.) supports visitors in the successful completion of the online goals with efficiency and effectiveness.

  • Efficiency = How quickly can visitors get to the information they want?
  • Effectiveness = How well are visitors able to complete intended tasks?

The usability team conducts Usability Audit Reviews (UARs), which are heuristic inspections of websites as well as mobile sites and apps that help identify design problems and provide recommendations to remediate the issues to help companies target areas of opportunity for improvement to everything from a specific task to entire sections of a site. When clients successfully implement recommendations there are often significant improvements in not only Satisfaction, but also other key performance indicators such as conversion, diversion of customer service calls, and site registration.

ForeSee Usability Audit ReviewLooking at survey data gives the usability team a sense of what visitors find to be the most important as well as problematic areas on a site so they can target the evaluation within areas that matter most.  Typical areas of focus include navigation within the context of a logged-in experience, navigation within a certain section of a site, product browsing, and site search.

UARs, however, are only a part of the analytics universe that companies draw from to optimize the customer experience.  There are several other ways company leaders leverage data to improve the usability of their sites.

Surveys

Surveys themselves are a critical Usability method.  Ongoing measurement via surveys – as long as they are respectful, relevant, real, results-oriented, and random – helps business leaders gain insight into the customer’s experience as they rate and rank site features and share ideas for future improvements over time, reflecting their changing goals and needs.  While clickstream analytics provide information about the what, where, when, and how behind an interaction, customer experience analytics provide the why. And having an idea of why people do the things they do when they do them helps organizations understand how satisfied visitors are with their experience, what they like and dislike, what frustrations or issues they are having, and if they are able to find what they intended.  Interface designers can use specific questions to target design features and functions in order to get a better sense of what is a need-to-have versus a nice-to-have element.

Personas

Personas are fictional people who represent major user groups of a site.  They help organizations to better understand the motivations and needs of visitors so they can select the right mix of functionality, features, and content.  Though the usability team does not create Personas, many companies find they are a useful means to understand who is using the site and what they need. Having the right data derived from an accurate measuring system helps create pictures of visitors while survey questions can provide demographic information, visitor intentions, and comments that breathe life into Personas.  With a better picture of users, it’s much easier to identify critical tasks and content to optimize. For example, it is better to answer the question, “Would Joe use this?” before developing a costly functionality that is not core to the experience and best serves Joe’s needs—especially when Joe represents 70% of your site visitors.

Usability Observation

Finally, customer experience data in concert with sophisticated SessionReplay technology can facilitate organic, on-demand usability observation.

Rather than having to find subjects and only being able to test a limited number of users, SessionReplay lets you focus on a segment of users based on survey data—essentially, automating the task of recruiting users.  SessionReplay technology can recreate a visitor’s experience as they attempt to complete a task, allowing you to target certain groups of users to see what they did (i.e. those who came to the site to purchase something but were unable to).

By seeing what actual visitors encountered and how they moved around the site while in their own environment — the search terms they entered but didn’t submit (not typically captured by clickstream analytics); the elements of the page they clicked on, thinking they were active links but were not; and technical problems they encounter that your IT team swears can never happen (haven’t we all tried to recreate a reported problem and been unable to?) — can better support the case for making site improvements.  The survey data both enables companies to target a segment of visitors to find replays that provides insight as well as helps round out the picture to understand what visitors’ intentions were, what they intended to do, and whether or not they believed to be successful or not in accomplishing their task.

Optimizing the Usability of a site is hard work, but is crucial because it can have a huge impact on a company’s bottom line in many ways, including increased satisfaction, conversion, and other critical KPIs.  By gathering intelligent information from a reliable methodology, business leaders can decide on the best and right things to change in order to achieve their goals.

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ForeSee’s Financial Services Benchmark

Posted on May 29, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

With a background in the financial services industry, I’m always curious to see how it fares in customer satisfaction. Today, ForeSee released its annual Financial Services Benchmark that reports the aggregate online satisfaction for the industry as well as individual segments such as credit unions, banks, lending institutions, investment banks and miscellaneous financially-focused organizations (such as financial media sites).

On average, customer satisfaction with financial services websites is a 72 out of a 100. Not bad. But considering, by our standards, scores of 80 or higher are considered “highly satisfied” and scores of 69 or lower are considered to be “less satisfied,” there is plenty of room for improvement in this industry as a whole. The chart below shows the overall industry average as well as customer satisfaction for each segment:

ForeSee's Financial Services Satisfaction Benchmark

ForeSee’s predictive methodology goes beyond just reporting a single satisfaction number for companies to benchmark against. By comparing future behaviors (such as likelihood to recommend and use again) of highly satisfied customers to less-satisfied customers illustrates the impact that customer satisfaction can have on a company’s future success.

Recommend

Based on likelihood scores, highly satisfied customers report being more likely than less-satisfied customers to recommend the company to a friend, family member or colleague, which means more business and increased loyalty:

  • Banking customers are 120% more likely to recommend.
  • Credit Union customers are 92% more likely to recommend.
  • Investment customers are 139% more likely to recommend.
  • Lending customers are 126% more likely to recommend.
  • Miscellaneous Financial customers are 96% more likely to recommend.

Use Again

Highly satisfied customers are much more likely than less-satisfied customers to return to or use the site or online resource again in the future, resulting in higher frequency of interaction, improved engagement and increased share of mind and wallet:

  • Banking customers are 38% more likely to use again.
  • Credit Union customers are 29% more likely to use again.
  • Investment customers are 56% more likely to use again.
  • Lending customers are 52% more likely to use again.
  • Miscellaneous Financial customers are 56% more likely to use again.

The bread and butter so to speak for financial services companies relies on whether or not customers are willing or planning to use or purchase more services in the future. If measured correctly, this behavior can be a key success indicator for future growth and long-term customer satisfaction.

  • Banking customers are 68% more likely than less-satisfied customers to use more products/services in the future.
  • Credit Union customers are 75% more likely than less-satisfied customers to use more products/services in the future.
  • Investment customers are 67% more likely than less-satisfied customers to use more products/services in the future.

Knowing how you stack up in the marketplace is a great first step, but measuring the customer experience should be a little more introspective than that. If you truly want to make an impact on the experiences customers have and make changes the really influence your bottom line, you need to understand your customers and figure out exactly what they want, need, and expect from you. Start by talking to them. Ask them questions. And most importantly…listen to them.

That’s the only way it works.

I’d be interested in hearing from financial services leaders about what metrics they are using and how they are using them to help make a difference in their organizations.

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A Tale of Two Yelps

Posted on May 28, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Kevin Muoio

By Kevin Muoio

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

Just like Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities, there is a duality afoot. This is no tale of peasantry and aristocracy of late 1700s London and Paris, but rather one set in the modern world of user ratings and reviews.

There were two incredible stories recently that set Yelp, and the user ratings space in general, back several steps.  With Dickensian flair, these stories are chockablock with intrigue, mistaken identities, threats of violence, heavy accents, etc. These two stories are everywhere this week and their details are too juicy to retell in detail here, but here’s a quick synopsis of each:

1) A Social Media / Ratings and Reviews “fixer” is recruiting senior Yelp reviewers for positive reviews

2) Amy’s Baking Company, a restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ received over one thousand negative Yelp reviews (most of them 1 star) based upon the restaurant appearing on the Gordon Ramsey TV show Kitchen Nightmares.   It’s a fantastic Kitchen Nightmares episode.  And everything else associated with this story is pretty friggin’ awesome as well.  In an attempt to defuse this ratings and reviews bomb, Yelp has deleted nearly all of the ratings and reviews added this week and are monitoring (deleting) most new ones.   Also, the restaurant has closed temporarily.

5 Star Reviews via XKCDSo, two awful setbacks for the ratings and reviews space, both coming on the heels of the FTC releasing over 700 complaints from restaurateurs about Yelp’s business practices, and this is what it boils down to: One Yelp that wants to build up restaurants (through payola) and One Yelp that seeks to destroy a restaurant with unearned (undeserved?) 1 star reviews.

What a week that was.  And what is the lesson to be learned here?

First off, I should start by saying that user ratings can be helpful at times to consumers that are looking for guidance in where to shop and eat. But the reality is that this type of user-generated feedback is really just that…feedback. Not measurement. And in the mobile world (especially in the mobile world), we need to get ahead of these experiences with predictive analytics powered by a scientific and proven methodology.

Through these tragic tales we learned that:

  • User generated ratings and reviews can be inflated or deflated in violent swings by people who have never been there or done that
  • Yelp is opt-in and reactive – plain and simple
  • Feedback is not representative of the experience of a random patron
  • There is no science to ratings and reviews

As a member of the mobile team at ForeSee, I can’t help but think of App Store ratings.   Why do these App store ratings matter?   They matter.  Big Time.  App Store ratings impact download volume and sales which is why developers beg users to review their apps, with the pleading beginning immediately after download in some cases.   Unlike Yelp, where reviewers don’t have to prove they’ve visited a restaurant, you must own an App in order to write a review on either Google Play or the Apple App Store.   Star ratings and reviews are still feedback…not measurement…but it’s at least a step in the right direction.   Measurement (especially good measurement) is random and representative: lovers, haters, and all those who fall somewhere in between.

But let’s face it – not every App is created equal or built to last. Some Apps don’t even have an expected App Store shelf life of a year.   Is your app built for the long haul?   If you measure, and measure correctly, within the mobile space you can offer customer experiences that will not only outlive the expectancy rate of other Apps but outshine competitors in the mobile space altogether for the long-term.  Why? Apps, more and more, are becoming key ingredients to a multi-channel strategy. And with a predictive methodology you can find and target areas of improvement that will help your App grow in value over time like a fine wine.

If you want to chat more about this or about mobile measurement, leave a comment below or email me directly.

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