How to react to negativity in customer support and reviews on Google Play and App Store?
Written by Ivan Zamesin, CEO & Founder at The Product Gene
Your product has a consistent weak spot and it is annoying more and more people. You have changed, or, what’s even worse, improved something, and now you’re getting calls and messages telling you how bad everything is, that your product is terrible and they demand their money back! How do you react?
- Man up and brace yourself. It’s an emotionally tough and, unfortunately, unavoidable part of being a PM or entrepreneur.
- You need to find out exactly what kinds of people are complaining and how many of them is out there. The good framework to apply here is ABCD segmentation. It allows you to break your audience into 4 categories:
A segment — they need your product a lot, buy often, pay a lot.
B segment — they need your product, but occasionally face some problems with it, the sale cycle is longer than with A segment. A and B segments combined bring you 80% of your profit.
C segment — they need the product, but have serious issues with yours; they pay rarely and take a lot of time of sales managers / support.
D segment — they want something changed for them, take most of the time of sales managers / support, never buy from you. C and D segments combined bring you 20% of your profit.
- Even if there is a small amount of negativity, coming from A and B segment, we begin to investigate the issue, since guys from A and B don’t normally complain. And there is a possibility that you broke something important to those who bring profit (and is super-active in services that monetize attention). If people from the C segment are the ones complaining — wait till the amount of people reaches some sort of threshold, for instance, 1%. Pick your own C-segment borderline, but it has to be quite high. If the D segment users are complaining, respond politely and do nothing about it.
- Why it is important not to react to single comments: people from C and D segments like to draw attention to themselves. To them, it’s not as important to solve an issue, as it is to talk about it. Think of your customer support as a kind of a sitting bench for a bunch of bored old ladies that take pleasure in nagging and gossiping. There are people that never use support for any product and there are people that use it all the time. That creates distortion is support data representativeness. That’s why you have to choose a threshold amount to catch the truly serious issues.
- Each negative review may have about 20 positive ones behind it, but you simply don’t receive them. People rarely write “you’re awesome, thank you so much!” if everything is good. Especially if a product is a commodity.
- Do not relay every customer support message to your team, because your colleagues may not understand the true importance of every complaint and feel demotivated because of what an unpaying customer said.
Hang in there, comrades!
