+55k 🚀 — The most rated Georgian mobile banking application
The story of how we become by far the most rated Georgian mobile banking application with almost perfect summary rating on the App Store.
Customers provide ratings and reviews on the App Store to give feedback on their experience with an app and help others decide which apps they’d like to try. You can ask for ratings and respond to reviews to improve your app’s discoverability, encourage downloads, and build rapport with people who use your app.
Users can rate your app on a scale of one to five stars and write reviews to share more detail about their experience.
In the last six months in TBC mobile banking, we got an additional 55k ratings and reviews on the App Store 🍾🍾🍾. Now we are a total of 70k with an average app’s summary rating of 4.9 stars 🤗 and moving forward day by day.
Our goal was not to get as many ratings and reviews as possible. We wanted to make the review process seamless and contextual to help our users easily provide their thoughts. The question was how and when we want to ask the user to provide the feedback.
When we are talking about an application used by hundreds of thousands of people, which proved itself throughout the years, every decision goes into detailed discussion and is evaluated by many competencies.
It would be interesting to go through the process of how we got here.
A little bit of backstory
The TBC Bank iOS application provides the best mobile banking experience for almost a decade. It got numerous rewards throughout the years. Concentration always was the user experience and reliability. The hardest part is to become trusted and then improve and innovate. And this is not an easy task at all.
The measurement for trusties and reliability comes from the user feedback. Our application newer shied away to ask the user what they are thinking and how things could get better. Meanwhile, we gathered 15k reviews. But it worth mentioning that in the last years, the review count was slowed down.
The problem domain
And why only 15? If we have dozens of users, why not 30 or even 100 🤔? This is a problem because we want to build a collective trust that encourages others to download and start using our product. And large review count on the App store page and almost five start summary ratings would definitely help.
It seemed like a massive amount of user feedback was missing. Many things could cause this, and all of them are pretty important when we start talking about the solution.
As we identified, our application asked for user feedback. If a user was generous to give one, we redirected her/him to an app store where a slow-loading process was taking place, and after several seconds it was allowed to get some input 🥱. Simply a horrible experience. This is the main reason why we only had 15k reviews at a time.
The second problem was the timing. We were asking for user feedback in weird moments. If a user just opened your app or executed some operation, it is very inappropriate to ask for some feedback. You may end up with one star or even complete removal.
As you see, we identified two significant problems, the unacceptable rate and review process and inappropriate timing.
The solution domain
We wanted to make the review process as painless and streamlined as possible. No more redirections or extra time spent with some loaders. Unpleasant feedback flow was a pretty known problem across the Apple ecosystem. Before iOS 10.3, there was no centralized mechanism to ask users the rate and review. But fortunately, apple introduced an object that controls the process of requesting App Store ratings and reviews from users.
The SKStoreReviewController API lets you give users an easy way to provide feedback about your app. You can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period. Users will submit a rating through the standardized prompt, and can write and submit a review without leaving the app.
This is a huge plus. The unified experience will encourage users to quickly identify what the app is asking and make a more thoughtful decision. It is all about anticipation. With these same alerts, everything seems familiar, and there is no risk of tapping submit button and redirect to another planet.
It is essential that we only have three shots in 365 days. And because of that, the timing got even crucial than before. We should wisely use them.
You can ask users to rate and review your app at appropriate times throughout the user experience. Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task. Make sure not to interrupt their activity.
We considered this and analyzed the moments when our users would most likely be satisfied. Based on the application domain, it should not be hard to identify such areas.
And it worked 🤗. We are more than happy to get positive and motivating reviews from our users.
Next to the 100k 🚀🚀🚀
Download TBC Bank applications from the App Store and Google Play.
