I tend to frequent the local Jimmy Johns sandwich shop a few times a week while running between meetings and always seem to show up at an off-peak time, when I’m the only customer in the store.  I go to the same location, order the same thing, and my expectations remain exactly the same.  I’m sure you can see where this is headed.  I ask them to hold the mayo on my sandwich and yep, you guessed it, nine out of ten times my sandwich comes back with mayo.  To make the situation worse, I don’t discover it until after I’m already at my destination (due to time constraints) so I just have to accept it. A similar set of circumstances occurs at another quick-food joint I frequent over the lunch hour.  And after it happening again today, I made a promise to myself that neither place will receive my business again (and you’re darn sure I’m going to tell my friends and colleagues all about it).  This is the kind of viral force you want to stay away from.

Get the simple things right!

Having spent my entire life as a customer, and the last 13 years in retail and as a professional services consultant (with client budgets ranging from a few hundred dollars to over a million dollars), I have come to realize that the simplest things can make the biggest impact, both in the relationship and the business. Interestingly, the big mistakes aren’t where you lose the most customers; it’s the tiny mistakes that drive them away.  If you have a good relationship with the client (I don’t like to call them customers because that makes them sound like a transaction – love your customers!), then they can accept an apology and move on.  However, repeated mistakes on simple tasks make them think you simply don’t care enough to pay attention to the details (or in more basic terms, their emotional needs). So how does this story relate to you as a Developer trying to promote your apps to potential clients? First, don’t take your app’s comments with a grain of salt.  If someone actually took the time to write a comment then they’re clearly passionate about something (and hopefully it’s positive).  If it’s a negative comment, then you should try contacting the person directly and addressing their concerns by offering to fix the issue. Second, if you don’t address client concerns or lack of features in this super-evolving and ultra-competitive app store, your product will become obsolete or even worse, never adopted in the first place.  Can you afford not to take any criticisms seriously?

Fixing a problem is more powerful than never having one.

I’ve read countless studies, and have learned this lesson from my own professional experience.  Namely, that a service mistake followed by a rectification of this issue produces happier and longer-lasting customers than if there was never a problem in the first place. Now, I wouldn’t suggest you go try to make problems, simply so you can solve them, but I would suggest that you take a hard look at your current frustrated customers and those that may have stopped using your app, then ask yourself why. Is there a way you can address their concerns and bring them back to using your app?  Are you willing to spend the time to turn them from disgruntled clients into advocates of your brand and your app (see this post on the Mobile Application Value Chain for details of the client journey)?  The results may shock you, and represents just the first step in creating sustainability for your app. Contact us for more information here.