Presented by unitQ
User retention, brand equity, and revenue are driven by product and experience quality. Learn how automated user feedback platforms drive significant improvements, how to integrate tools into your workflow, and more in this VB Live event.
“Companies trying to grow, trying to increase engagement and retention, can’t do that if they don’t have actionable intelligence around quality issues,” says Anthony Heckman, head of growth at unitQ.
Companies compete around a variety of vectors, he explains. In the content arena, it’s incredibly easy for companies to copy functionality that works. Snapchat grows successful and Instagram launches Live. TikTok gets big, and Instagram launches Reels. A company can compete on price, but you don’t necessarily want to be the lowest cost provider in your industry. That means product quality is key.
“We see, across the board, that category-leading companies, without question, are winning on this metric,” Heckman says.
Companies have historically tried to understand quality by manually looking at user feedback — manually reviewing support tickets and app store reviews, and then trying to identify quality issues and bucket those to understand impact, which doesn’t make sense for a person to do, Heckman says.
“Identifying is one thing, but quantifying impact is hard to do when you’re not looking at every source of user feedback and every channel of feedback,” he explains.
That’s where automated user feedback platforms come in. They can look at all sources of user feedback, both private and public data (with no personally identifying information, however), in all languages, all the time, then take every issue and sort them to get an in-depth picture of how users are responding to your product.
“We can say, across Twitter, your customer support email, App Store, Play Store, Reddit, and so on, that 87 people have reported an issue relating to the chat functionality being slow on Android version XYZ — that’s the level of detail,” he explains. “That allows product teams to prioritize a fix. If I’m in a product role, my job is to add functionality and make improvements to the product that move the company forward, that drive growth.”
Companies need granular issue reports, down to the platform, the version, the language, and region of an issue that’s being reported, and then exactly what people are saying and exactly when it started getting reported, and what they were doing in the product at that time.
“Our customers, on average, see a 20% improvement in product quality within 30 days of going live on the platform,” Heckman says. “They’re identifying issues, using a solution with machine learning, fixing them fast, and customers respond in turn.”
Some of the impact includes a decrease in support ticket volume, which is essential, because every email has a cost associated with it, and reducing the volume saves money. Retention improves, with session lengths growing longer, which means stronger engagement on your platform, increasing the amount you can charge your advertisers. If you can even have a small impact on long-term retention, you have a significant impact on the trajectory of the business, because that compouSentimennds over time.
It also directly impacts the average star ratings on the App Store and Play Store, he adds.
“By identifying these issues and empowering companies to fix them, that increases their star rating, which has a massive impact on conversion, brand, the value of your marketing dollar, and more,” Heckman says.
Sentient is another metric that companies can use to improve their product quality, enabling them to win by providing a better product experience.
“With sentiment analysis you can see how sentiment tracks not just on any functionality in the product, but from release to release,” he says. “Sentiment analysis gives companies another way to understand product quality, and to give product people another way to prioritize what gets worked on next.”
You may have a lower volume of reported issues on a feature, but even if it gets reported less, all that feedback might be 100% negative. If users aggressively hate something in the newest release, that’s something to take action on ASAP — your users are always your best sounding board, and the better you get at listening to them, the better your product will be.
To learn more about the ways product quality impacts retention, how to identify and improve product quality issues, how to select the right automated quality platform and more, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
Attendees will take away:
- A broad overview of how product quality impacts user retention, brand equity and revenue
- An in-depth look at how to drive significant improvements in product quality in a cost-effective manner
- How to select and implement the right automated quality analysis platform
- And more!
Speakers:
- Greg Burch, VP Engineering, StyleSeat
- Kyle Nesbit, Chief Resident & Technical Lead, Gradient Ventures
- Anthony Heckman, Head of Growth, unitQ
- Ben Ilfeld, Head of Product, VentureBeat (moderator)
