App Reviews: 3 clever ways to convert negative reviews to positive
There are a lot of articles on requesting app reviews the clever way: after a successful use case, redirecting to store if positive & to feedback form if negative.
But still we have negative reviews appear on app stores: Apple, Play & Windows Phone. So we’d (I and my Customer Evangelist Nikita Kosholkin) like to share our experience of converting negative responses to positive and, hence, improving our ASO.
Windows Phone rules!
I mean it. It rules in terms of working with user feedback: you can respond to the reviews and, what is most important, user receives your responses by mail and his responses are emailed to you (Google Play has the option of responding to comments as well, but you’re limited in the legth of comment and you don’t get user responses to your email). This is super convenient. I hope Apple and Google follow Microsoft in this area (I had no idea I could ever say so ☺)
Take a look how we converted a user from negative to positive review:
How it works for App Store
Well, you know Apple gives you no way to communicate with user, clarify her problem and address it. But it still gives you some clues, which you may use. Here is Nikita’s process to find authors of negative reviews:
- Nickname — people tend to use same nicknames across different websites, so we try to google their nicknames. We have once found our user via eBay and have addressed her negative experience with our app.
- Naming convention — usually people use nicknames such as “jdoe” first letter of first name and last name. We then use “LIKE %doe%” statements to find this user in our database.
- Country matters — we had this case when we googling by nickname returned no results, but as soon as we added country — it worked! App Store tells you which country the user is from
- Use other app — app store allows you to view this user’s other comments in other apps. And some of those apps allow communicating with other users (e.g. messengers). So we install that app, search by nickname and contact the user!
Support chat
One of the features we developed for our app is “Support” chat which allows us to support our users in real-time. It helps a lot to process feedback, convert negative ones and just chat with other users, you know ☺
Hope this helps you to have more positive reviews — if you like this post, then please download our app.. Oh yeah and review it ☺
