Mobile App Customer Sentiment: 2022 Customer Engagement Benchmarks

The following data and information is from our 2022 Mobile App Customer Engagement Report.

Understanding consumer sentiment starts with gauging consumer emotion. Apptentive’s Love Dialog feature is used to gather the data, which starts with a simple “yes” or “no” question: “Do you love our company?”

In 2021, 93% of all consumers who were prompted by a Love Dialog responded “Yes” or “No” rather than closing out of the prompt. On iOS, the number was even higher at 96%, compared to 87% of consumers on Android. The Love Dialog garners such high response rates primarily because of its simplicity. People are willing to answer short, simple questions and share feedback when they’re proactively asked for it at the right mobile moment. The Love Dialog allows mobile teams to take a quick, regular pulse of consumer health and happiness over time.

Let’s focus on the people who responded “Yes,” which make up our Love Percent. In 2021, 64% of consumers prompted responded that “Yes,” they loved the brand. These quick responses are a great way for brands to quickly understand consumer emotion without asking people to leave the app for feedback, or to take another step away from their intended use of the app. They’re also a much better indicator of consumer happiness and potential lifetime value than lagging metrics like NPS.

Expressed customer sentiment

Winning brands have moved away from using passive, lagging indicators (like NPS) to measure consumer satisfaction. Instead, their focus is now on fluid, comprehensive metrics like Love Percent and Expressed Sentiment to holistically understand the voice of the customer. By keeping a constant pulse on emotion through regular check-ins and proactively asking for—and acting on—feedback, brands are able to enhance first-party customer data, better understand customer journeys, and deliver product enhancements that can actually be tied to longer lifetime value, improved consumer happiness, and more revenue.

Measuring customer emotion and sentiment helps brands build first-party data profiles and offer more personalized digital experiences. We capture emotion data through Fan Signals™, which allows mobile teams to measure expressed sentiment across time and touchpoints, identifying Fans, Risks, and when sentiment has shifted—down to individual customer IDs.

To measure emotion data, consumers are grouped into six segments:

In 2021, the mobile channel was used to supplement in-person touchpoints, and brands got better at leveraging it at a regular cadence. Repeat Fans (30%) outpaced New Fans (27%), which means brands are getting better at prompting consumers with the Love Dialog more than once. In return, consumers are regularly responding with their feedback, sticking around long enough to be prompted multiple times. The regular cadence of asking for and receiving consumer feedback allows brands to create continuous feedback loops and offer better in-app experiences over time.

An average of 14% of consumers shifted their emotions in 2021 (Shifted to Fan + Shifted to Risk). Within the shifted emotions, an average of 52% of consumers shifted from Fan to Risk. We know that people will not have positive brand experiences all the time. But most companies are unable to predict churn before it happens, which is why being able to identify shifts in emotions as they happen is so important. By measuring changes in sentiment in real time, brands can get ahead of churn by proactively reaching out to consumers, especially those who have shifted from Fan to Risk. Understanding why people are unhappy and working to fix what went wrong gives brands an advantage over those who can’t quantify consumer experience in the same way.

Related customer sentiment resources:

• Five Ways to Track Customer Sentiment
• More Than a Buzzword: 4 Customer Sentiment Analysis Use Cases
• The Business Impact of Customer Experience
• What is the Voice of the Customer (VOC)?
• Live By the Fan or Die by the Mob, Which Side are Your Customers On?
• 15 of the Best Customer Trust Quotes

Want to see how specific categories compare as well ase the macro trends we identified in our 2022 Mobile Customer Engagement Report? Download your copy here.