How to get the best customer feedback insights from app reviews

Do you know if users like your mobile app? Sure, knowing your app’s star score is a great first step, but this data alone is not actionable. You need to dig deeper to understand why people are scoring your app like they are. 

So many businesses only look at their app review score, then take guesses at why they received those scores. These guesses aren’t based on anything other than a hunch or a guess. To get data-backed insights, you need to dive deeper.

Idiomatic can play a key role in helping you get these actionable insights from your customer data. 

Why app review data is important

Scored app reviews give you a quantitative way to measure customer satisfaction with your app. While this is helpful, it doesn’t give you enough information to know what aspects they’re satisfied or dissatisfied with. 

To get a deeper understanding of the specifics of their experience and understand customer sentiment, you’ll need to analyze this data from different sources to learn where you’re not meeting customer expectations and needs. 

However, analyzing this data manually can be a long, never-ending process that usually only generates vague, surface-level conclusions. The success of your customer feedback strategy should include a component of software support through an AI-driven program like Idiomatic, that can help you streamline the collection and analytics process. 

How do you get customer feedback on an app?

There are many ways to collect feedback to learn how customers use your app and what they like or dislike about it. You could:

• Send a targeted survey asking for their feedback
• Monitor social media 
• Set up a profile on third-party review websites like App stores, TechCrunch, and Trustpilot
• Analyze customer support call transcripts

👉Learn more about collecting customer insights for your app or product.

9 Actionable tips for using and analyzing app review data

To get the most helpful feedback insights from app review data, here are our top tips:

1. Aggregate and centralize app review data

You’re likely receiving app reviews from multiple sources. Some may be on Google Reviews, Facebook, and software review websites. More app feedback may be found in customer service conversations or social media. To get the fullest picture, use a tool to aggregate and centralize review data for analysis. This will be a huge time saver when analyzing the data to derive your insights. 

For example, Idiomatic can aggregate customer feedback data through dozens of available integrations with voice of customer feedback sources like app reviews, help desk transcripts, and social media.

👉View Idiomatic’s integration capabilities.  

2. Categorize user reviews by topic

It’s not actionable to know people score your app a 3/5. It tells you there’s room for improvement, but where should those improvements or changes be made? If you can properly categorize app reviews, you can attribute scores to specific topics (like specific features or user experience), helping you understand exactly where your app is falling short or succeeding.  

Idiomatic creates custom labels organized in easy-to-understand categories and issues so you can uncover trends you may not have noticed before. 

3. Segment reviews by tech specs

In addition to categorizing your reviews, you can assign additional segments to understand the issues. This could include segmenting issues by star rating, app version, and operating system. These insights dig even deeper into the specific reasons (or causes) for customer complaints. 

4. Do sentiment analysis 

Many people use hyperbole or turns-of-phrase in their reviews, which can mislead your analysis if you’re not looking closely enough. To understand the actual feedback, it’s helpful to read between the lines to understand the customer’s sentiment. This can help you learn more about what issues lead to negative sentiment and reviews. 

The best way to do sentiment analysis is to have it done by an AI platform—especially if you have thousands of reviews to analyze. 

Here’s an example of how Idiomatic does sentiment analysis:

5. Identify common themes and recurring issues

When analyzing app review feedback, look for common themes and trends in the data. The insights relating to common themes in the data are likely the issues you want to prioritize because they affect a wide range of customers. Problems that seem to be one-offs may result from user error or misunderstandings that aren’t likely to be repeatable. 

6. Discover unmet needs and customer desires

Reading customer reviews can help you hear, in the customer’s voice, what they think about your app. These can be further understood by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what they’re trying to say or looking for common phrases like:

• “I wish the app did [THIS].”
• “I wasn’t able to [THIS].”
• “I struggled to [DO THIS].”
• “I’ve seen other apps [DO THIS] better.”

Knowing what your customers need can help you make app updates and fixes to provide a better customer experience that meets more (or all) of their needs. The more of their needs you can satisfy, the more loyal they’re likely to be to your brand. 

Idiomatic takes natural language processing a step further to help you get more specific about the causes of customer satisfaction. Idiomatic uses supervised machine learning to train custom analytics models to label feedback for more specificity than basic NLP processing alone can achieve. 

7. Route issues to the team(s) best suited to address them

Dealing with customer reviews shouldn’t be left to one person or department. The goal is to have an individual or team coordinating the feedback and disseminating it to the appropriate teams for action. If this process can be automated, it takes the onus off the feedback collection team and helps trending issues get addressed and fixed quickly. 

8. Responding and engaging with customers

Some would argue that the worst thing you can do with your online app reviews is ignore or leave them unanswered. This shows your customers (and prospective customers) that you don’t care enough about them to respond and act on their feedback. This will lead to having a more difficult time soliciting feedback and a poor perception of your customer service abilities. 

9. Benchmark performance against competitors.

Knowing how your app reviews compare to your competitors is another excellent benchmark to measure your success. In your industry, customers may be more discerning and rarely give out 5/5 scores. You can look up your competitors’ app reviews online to see their customer-perceived weaknesses and what their customers (likely similar to yours) are looking for in software. 

Knowing this, you can solve these problems with your app and eventually attract customers away from your competitors to your app because you solve the customer’s problems better. 

Idiomatic success story

To maintain our client’s privacy, we’ll refer to them as Client X.

Client X is a video and photo online sharing platform that used Idiomatic to discover that their users were struggling with new account creation. Their COO used Idiomatic to get the specifics about when and where this issue was occurring and discovered that a bug in the code only affected mobile sign-ups. 

Their COO estimated that if left undiscovered, this problem would have costed them upwards of $1 million per year in lost revenue if not fixed. 

👉Learn more about how companies have used Idiomatic to streamline customer feedback analysis.

How to use AI to get the “why” behind customer feedback reviews

When you’re reviewing app data manually, you open the possibility for bias in the analysis. However, you get faster and less biased results using AI for customer service and feedback analysis. 

Idiomatic is a best-in-class customer feedback and review analysis software that:

• Gathers, tags, categorizes, tags, and analyzes your app review data to get the insights you need to understand the why behind customer app review scores. 
• Tells you the issues causing the most customer friction and the roadblocks to your company’s growth. 
• Scales with your business without worrying about human errors in manual tagging and analysis. 

Idiomatic customers report a 40% decrease in top customer issues, a 250% increase in product satisfaction, and thus higher average app reviews. 

Request your Idiomatic demo today to see how it can turn your app review data into valuable insights. 

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