Customer Retention Through Mobile Applications

By Author: Jennifer Lewis
Total Articles: 304
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In the highly competitive market, the customers have more and more options available to them. This means that at the slightest inconvenience or unsatisfactory performance, the customer can switch the provider. This drives a low customer loyalty. With your competition also clamoring for the attention of your potential customers, new customer acquisition has become much more challenging and complex than ever. Because of this, it has become all the more important for the businesses to keep a hold of the existing ones.

Smart devices and the applications that reside on them are a primary mechanism of reaching out to, engaging, acquiring and servicing a customer today. This makes them a great platform for trying to retain customers. However, simply having an application is not enough. You need to work towards creating a good and engaging experience for the customer if you want them to stay with you.

Since the smart devices are highly personal gadgets, the customers equate the experience they have with your branded application there with what your brand stands for. Even the best of brands that have poorly performing ...
... mobile applications tend to have a negative image in the back of the customer’s mind. So, when designing and maintaining code for the smart devices, you have to be very careful. It can help you improve your reputation, but if not executed properly, it can also spell doom for your image.

So how do you go about improving the customer experience with your product? Here are some tips.

Regular updates

Inundated with content from a multitude of sources, the users today have short attention spans. They are constantly looking for new content and new functionalities. Even if they have the best product for their requirements, they will go out hunting for others, because they got bored of the one they had. This is the reality of the millennial generation.

If you think that once you successfully launched you application and the users have downloaded the same, your job is done, you are wrong. You need to invest time, money and resources in keeping the application updated with new features, better functionalities, and improved content to ensure that the users are constantly engaged, and their hunger for newness satisfied.

Feedback is your friend

Customers today are very vocal about their experiences and feelings. Most commercial stores provide them the opportunity to voice their opinion through ratings and comments. This works both ways for the product owner. On one hand, new user acquisitions become difficult, as people see poor comments. And refrain from downloading. On the other hand, it’s a great tool for improvement.

If you see your product doing poorly on the ratings front, don’t just sit there helplessly. Read through the comments and feedback. You will often find that the poor ratings originate from a limited number of issues, which can often be fixed with some development effort. Do that and you can significantly improve ratings. Plus, you get brownie points for having listened.

Make Your App Rewarding

People like to get rewarded for completing game challenges. Rewards make it fun and also make the users want to keep coming back and keep playing. If you find a good way to make your customers feel rewarded when spending time on your app, they’ll feel more inclined to keep playing it, and it’s unlikely they’ll delete it in the fear that they’ll lose their hard earned work.

In the end, customer retention is all about addressing their needs. The challenge today is that those needs are a moving target. But with a mix of evolution and improvisation, it should be easy to keep them happy.

The author is associated with the leading iPhone developer Dallas TX. It offers mobile app development solutions to leading brands like ebay, Cisco and Coca Cola. It is also one of the best iPad application development companies.