Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-text-247708/
We reside in a world where people spend most of their time hooked to the internet. Being one of the busiest platforms today, the internet is responsible for generating millions of businesses today. This has even changed the customer’s perspective on the market.
They have more power than they ever had before, and that is the reason why businesses are becoming more customer-centric.
Reviews and ratings have become one of the most important aspects of business today. In order to manage app store rating and reviews, app developers are leaving no stone unturned. As per a local consumer review survey, it was recorded that nearly 86% of consumers read reviews specifically for the local businesses, while almost 57% of them would only consider giving a particular rating to any business.
Why Are Online Reviews Being A Game-changer?
Reviews are the most powerful way by which your customers gives you validation. It is the best form of external validation for your business.
The rules are set.
Getting good reviews equals to enhancing your brand reputation in the market and bad reviews, of course, mean gaining a bad brand reputation.
Currently, most of the businesses have already set their foothold online and the rest of them are yet to explore the online domain. Reviews matter the most when it comes to mobile apps.
Apart from the impact on app downloads, reviews also affect the app’s visibility in the respective app store search results and how likely it is to be featured on the app store.
What Should You Expect From Your Users?
While you read the reviews of any app, you generally come across negative comments, because users by nature are more likely to update you with a list of complaints rather than complements.
Users will never remain quiet and will go straight ahead to jot down a negative review if your app crashes even for once. However, the rest of the people for whom your app works great are too lazy to post five-star ratings or reviews for your app.
So, now you see how difficult it is to manage app store rating and reviews.
Paying close attention to the user reviews and engagement is the key element to increase the number of app downloads. Great feedback has a real impact on the market since more positive comments usually lead to better ratings and get you more people who want to try your app.
Related Read- How To Win Millennial Customers With Your On Demand App?
So Let’s Take A Look At 3 Clever Ways By Which You Can Manage App Store Rating And Reviews:
1. Generate In-app User Feedback
A proverb like “Prevention Is Better Than The Cure“ is often used for warning people against any uncertain crisis.
Similarly, you need to prevent your users from providing negative reviews on your app.
Your app should stay immune from the possibility of getting negative reviews. The best way to ensure this is to have another simple, and intuitive channel, where your users can reach you directly if they are facing any issue.
Here, they can directly express their anger, and get confirmation from your side before they explode with their negative comments in the public.
This channel is known as in-app feedback.
It will help you to beat all the odds as you will have a direct and open channel with your users to manage the conversation, gather feedback, and act immediately.
Let’s go deeper into what the in-app user feedback and how it is used to gather customer feedback?
Your app or website is the obvious place for feedback collection so, start with that. Go for simple, strategic placement of the contact forms or survey forms in your site or app. Interested and concerned users will definitely fill up these forms and their issues will be available to you directly through it.
I have made a list of few feedback collection systems, that can be included directly within your app or website.
Just be sure that you are not annoying your users with constant form submission requests.
2. Make Use Of The App Review Plugin
Making use of the app review plugin makes it simpler for your users to provide a review for your app. There are several app review plugin solutions that you can take advantage of. Some of them include WP Review, WP Product Review Lite, Appirater.
Regardless of whatever plugin you use, one thing that you need to be careful about is timing. Of course, nobody would like to see the review request popup screen too soon.
In this case, you have to be realistic. You have to understand that the user first needs to try out your app in order to express their experience. So, if you show a review popup too soon then this trick may simply roadblock your entire endeavor. It could annoy your users and actually lead to bad reviews, even if your app was an outstanding one for them.
Thus, you need to be very careful while you deal with the app review plugin system.
3. Be Responsive To The Reviews
Feedbacks always makes you better.
So, it is absolutely important to respond to every review. Although it is not possible to respond to each and every review, at least you can keep a constant check on the reviews, choose the important ones and respond to them.
Pay special attention to the negative reviews and ensure the user that you will work on his feedback. Also, thank the users who leave a positive review on your website and ensure them you’ll keep up to their expectations.
This displays the most important thing for a user — your attention and care. Being responsive means you are listening to what they have to say and, most importantly it shows that you are actually appreciating their feedback.
Providing exceptional customer service is going to go a long way and it will most definitely trigger additional engagement.
Further, you will also come across several reviews that contain suggestions, recommendations, or even help requests. Hence, your attention to the app reviews is not only beneficial, but the best way to improve app store rating.
Summing Up
You can’t afford to ignore your users — you just can’t.
Following the above-mentioned points are not only essential to getting better app reviews but also necessary to enhance your brand reputation. Throughout years, I have seen that these three strategies are highly crucial and advantageous for determining your app’s position in the market.
Increasing your mobile app reviews is a highly complex and continuous process. However, it actually ensures your first major step towards further success. Even the top app development companies today suggest these essential tricks for getting positive reviews for an app.
That’s a great article, thank you for it. Today you need to work with app reviews even more than ever: the competition is very high and your app’s rating does make a difference.
I’d also like to add a few other secrets for managing app reviews:
1. Start with responding first to featured, long and updated (became worse) reviews. Featured reviews are those that passerby will see first and if they are without a response and/or negative, this will affect your conversion to install. long and Updated are signal that your users care about your app, give a detailed feedback and are not happy that you ignored it. Responding to them will help you retain users and also updates your backlog with new feature requests.
2. Report spam and inappropriate reviews. They drop your app rating, reputation, and installs. I wrote a guide here on how to identify them and report https://appfollow.io/blog/how-to-remove-fake-and-inappropriate-app-reviews-in-the-app-store-and-google-play
3. Automate responding to repetitive reviews like “thank you”, “love the app”, etc. Users will see that you care and their loyalty will increase.
4. Also, a PRO tip: once you fixed problems that users mentioned in their reviews, go back and respond to it saying that all is fixed. This will push them to update their reviews’ rating —> your app’s rating will grow, too.
Customer reviews are an integral part of successful commerce. BUT the creators of the review prompt software need to write a subroutine that checks if the customer has already been contacted or has given a review on that store or mall. Especially true for retail outlets visited weekly. Let’s see if someone can’t fix this flaw in an otherwise important app.