2019 Engagement Benchmarks for Travel App Success

What if you could get a daily pulse on how your customers feel and how that changes over
time? What if you could watch how customer sentiment changes in real-time following
version releases, feature releases, and more? It could be the driving force in making data-driven product roadmap decisions and having a comprehensive view of customer sentiment.

In order to fully understand how your app’s experience compares with the market, it’s important to look at benchmarks in your specific app category. Metrics of success look different across industries based on differences in customer engagement opportunities and goals.

Our 2019 Mobile Benchmarks by App Category report looks at trends and differences across popular app categories, with a focus on Travel apps. Below is a taste of the Travel-focused data featured in the report, including a “scorecard” showing average engagement and feedback benchmarks for apps in the Travel category and category-specific tips for success. The Travel-focused data and recommendations make it even easier for you to analyze your current strategy, without comparing yourself to apps in other categories who approach feedback and engagement differently due to industry needs.

Profile of an average app in the Travel category

There are many challenges and opportunities unique to apps in the Travel category. Differences in how customers use Travel apps, along with how Travel brands leverage their apps as customer engagement tools, impact industry benchmarks for apps across the category.

Below is a profile of an average app in the Travel category to give you an idea of how your engagement and feedback strategy currently performs.

Sentiment is the emotion behind customer engagement and is at the heart of understanding, measuring, and improving our relationships. When you monitor sentiment, you try to measure the tone, context, and feeling from customer actions. We tracked sentiment for apps in the Travel category, and here’s what we found.

3 tips for Travel app success

1. Invest in two-way messaging

The opportunity to connect with customers has never been greater than when you’re in their pockets. In-app messaging allows you to turn your app into a communication channel, particularly when you provide the ability to send and receive two-way messages. These messages help you gather feedback, solve customer problems, and stay on the pulse of customer sentiment.

In-app messages makes it easy for you to hear about problems before they make it to the app store and respond to customers with two-way conversations. You are able to get to the bottom of the problem and build relationships with your customers in-app support—again, without ever asking them to disrupt their experience by leaving the app.

Let’s take Airbnb as an example. Airbnb provides a place within their app for customers to leave feedback or to report a bug, which is a great start. However, they don’t provide the ability to respond to learn more about the issue, or to close the loop by letting customers know when their product feedback has been implemented. Although one-way in-app messaging is a great starting point, it’s a missed opportunity to deepen the relationship with customers who provide feedback through this channel.

2. Analyze your in-app engagement

What are your customers telling you, but without really telling you? In most cases, you can understand sentiment by looking at customer activity within you app—and sometimes it’s the best feedback you’ll receive.

Let’s take an app’s FAQ section for example. FAQ sections provide short answers to popular customer questions. Although the channel may look static, it’s actually a great place to gather and act on customer feedback based on how customers are using the information. For instance, if the FAQ section has a 0:07 average on-page time and an awful bounce rate, there is a part of the experience that is not being properly communicated as customers are visiting the support content but are not utilizing it. Another area for feedback is digging into each question to see which is the most popular, and thinking about how to make the answer more obvious in the onboarding process for new customers. When it comes to gleaning insight from this “silent” form of customer feedback, the sky’s the limit.

3. Engage with customers on social media channels

Having an active, engaging social media presence is a fantastic way for customers to connect with brands in the Travel category wherever they are, whenever they need to. It’s also a great way for brands to promote new app features customers may be interested in, and to deepen relationships with their fans.

For example, take this amazing testimony from a happy customer of HotelTonight. The customer takes a moment to rave about a less-popular feature within the app, the Concierge Service HotelTonight provides. HotelTonight then takes the opportunity to not only respond to the positive comments, but to share more about the feature for others who may be curious. It also helped that this particular happy customer has a large Twitter following of their own, which helped spread the review to a new audience of potential customers. Win-win!

Now it’s your turn

As the above categorical data shows, being customer centric is not an option anymore. It’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the need of the hour.

We release this category-specific benchmark data so Finance brands can understand how effectively they measure their customer experience, communicate with their customers, and earn customer love. If after reading you’ve realized you’ve missed the benchmark, we want to help. Connect with us to discuss your options and see how Being Apptentive can move you closer toward these benchmarks immediately.

Note on methodology: This report includes data from over 800 unique Android and iOS apps across all app categories, from January 2018 to December 2018. The data was captured by interactions deployed using Apptentive’s mobile communication platform. Benchmarks vary depending on the nature of the vertical and the data in this report will be useful for companies to see how they stack up against the overall market as well as against others in their category.