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Mobile App User Review Best Practices

Reduce risk and foster customer trust and loyalty by following these best practices for handling user feedback for your mobile apps. Rather than trying to guess what users want, take advantage of the available channels from Apple and Google so they can simply tell you.

Users are free to navigate to your app's listing in the App Store and Google Play to submit star ratings and reviews. There are enough steps in the process that those willing to expend the effort to complete them tend to be users with an axe to grind. For a more balanced representation of your user base, make it easier for everyone to provide feedback by displaying a prompt in your app. Identify the events in your app that will trigger the review request. You can define several. You won't overwhelm users because Apple and Google will throttle your requests to display the invitation. Think about times when you are likely to catch users in a good mood. That may be when they just completed a purchase, found an ideal match for their home search... or dating search.

Prompting users to rate and review will almost surely result in more valuable feedback for you. In order to keep it coming, and trending more positive over time, keep these things in mind when you reply. Your responses should be:

  1. Timely (Ideally within 1 business day, but definitely within a week)
  2. Honest (We missed that.)
  3. Empathetic/Apologetic (We’re sorry you are experiencing trouble.)
  4. Grateful (Thank you for taking the time to let us know.)
  5. Personalized (Don’t post the same canned reply to every review.)
  6. Helpful (Is there a work-around to help the user in the short-term?)
  7. Informative (What are you doing to address the issue, if there is one? And when do you think it will be addressed?)
  8. Inquisitive (Provide a means outside of the review process, like an email address where they can provide more details, including more sensitive information like a user name.)
  9. Conclusive (Update the review response with details of the fix once an issue is addressed.)

Following the steps above will demonstrate to your users that you care about them, their feedback, and the quality of your product. As long as you act on the feedback, you should see reviews trend much more positive over time. Remember to reply to those positive reviews too!