Adam Scroggin
Great tips for improving the customer experience for your mobile app.
One of the coolest features we have added to our apps is a service called Intercom. It provides a chat feature that makes it easy for your customers to get a hold of you. It's a great way to have conversations with you customers instead of just "closing tickets". Intercom has awesome capabilities that allow you to onboard new customers, retain them via push notifications, and re-engage customers who are slipping away. You can try it out for 14 days for free.
Your continuous integration build is green, all of your unit tests are passing, and you have tested everything. You launch your app and you suddenly see several crashes that you didn't catch in your testing. The real world is a wild place and it is difficult to replicate some cases in a testing environment. By releasing to a smaller group (~10%), you can catch a lot of these issues before your entire customer base. One thing to keep in mind, you can never test too much!
For Android apps, check out Android Beta Testing
For iOS apps, check out TestFlight
If you haven't read The Lean Startup, do so now. Treat your ideas for your mobile app as a hypothesis and try to validate it as quickly as possible. To summarize, use a Build->Measure->Learn development cycle. We always think we know what our customers want. But after investments of time and money, we find out that we were wrong. Make smaller bets!
One way to expedite this cycle is to use prototyping. Our designers and product managers really love Invision. You can quickly build prototypes, download them to a phone and do some quick user testing to get feedback.
Nothing is more frustrating to users when your app crashes. As developers, we know mobile is a very dynamic platform and you have to keep up with OS changes. There are several options for monitoring crashes, but the two we have used the most are New Relic and Google Analytics.
We saved the best for last. You need to stay on top of reviews about your app from your customers. With Telescope (app review monitor), all of your reviews are collected from the Apple App Store and the Google Play store.
With Telescope, you can see where your customers are having problems with your app. It's a great place to collect feature requests too.
Telescope also has an awesome notification system where you can get instant emails and notifications sent to Slack.
