Beam has always provided easy ways for its customers to give instant feedback around any aspect of our service.
Sticking to our lean approach of developing product features to allow for feedback from within the apps, we initially decided on allowing a user to send us a simple email into an Inbox that could be monitored by our support and product teams.
For a number of months this solution worked very well for us, but soon after our customer base started to scale and our product offering started to expand.
It was becoming difficult to quickly scan feedback and easily understand how it correlated to our app experience (or particular app features) and more importantly, how it affected our product design backlog for that week.
We needed a better way to manage and make sense of customer feedback that came in via our apps.
Zendesk Mobile SDK
We decided to push ahead and try out the Zendesk iOS SDK that would allow us for better control of feedback flowing from the app into our support channel.
We began to surface unobtrusive, relevant and one-tap feedback prompts that allowed for more contextual feedback from within the app.
As an example, lets say a customer has just walked into a Costa Coffee store at The Dubai Mall and purchases a coffee. At the end of that transaction, we can easily prompt for feedback. “How was your Beam experience at Costa Coffee?”
Mind you, there are a number of ways we can prompt for this feedback – via email, push notification, in-app message – and we can also play around with when exactly this is promoted – immediately after the transaction, in a few hours, at night time, outside the Mall or perhaps sometime in the next day.
For now, we’ve kept things quite simple and ask for feedback straight away with one tap.
This time around, instead of pushing a simple email message, we instantly create a Zendesk ticket and quickly begin a conversation with our customer. Based on a new ticket trigger, we can immediately message the customer to thank them for their feedback and give them a response timeframe if needed.
Furthermore, during the time of automated ticket creation, we assign a set of meaningful tags to not only help track, surface and respond to this feedback, but to also paint a better picture of the context.
For instance, we can include meaningful things such as the store name, the mall that the store is in, the type of transaction that took place, terminal ID that processed the transaction, mobile device type and perhaps the app version.
Basically, we can surface any bits of information that we deem useful to making more sense of the feedback or useful to helping with our conversation with the customer.
By tagging up the feedback, we can also start to discover trends that could uncover issues with training or infrastructure at a store level, or highlight underlying issues with the user experience within the app. Perhaps the app was slow; perhaps there was important information missing that the customer was seeking; perhaps they were discouraged by something completely unexpected.
By noticing trends, it also allows us to segment tickets and conversations into meaningful customer groups. This makes it quite powerful in a sense that it provides an opportunity to engage directly with these customers and uncover insights and that can eventually lead to a better product experience.
Trends also allow us to prioritise and create stories of future releases of the app. They allow us to gauge how critical a certain issue is and how fast we need to deliver a solution to improve the experience.
Overall, tracking feedback in this manner will help to continuously improve app features and also engage with our customers at and early stage. We can now reach out to them and let them know that we’ve listened to their feedback, and in turn, improved their experience. It takes a little bit more effort to establish the initial setup, but once this is done, the benefits far outweigh this.
As our user base grows, having a sensible, well organised, and meaningful feedback channels will help us to deliver new, improved and relevant features to our customers.