Mobile Moments: People, Not Users

Communication takes on many forms. We are big evangelists of two-way conversations and reaching out and understanding more of your customers. I want to dig in to more of why that’s really important.

A couple of years ago, we started talking about this concept of an engagement bell curve with our customers. We would say hey, many of you have this bell curve whether or not you realize it. At this end are all the people who are really unhappy. They’re one star reviews. Over here at this end you have all the people who are really happy, five star reviews. They say great things about you. They’re super happy with you. That’s five stars. In between you have this whole mass of people who’ve never said anything about you. You’re probably spending all of your time thinking about the one star reviews and reacting to that vocal minority.

When we started talking about this, over and over again marketers and business leaders would say that’s not just our mobile app business problem, this is our entire company’s problem. The reason is every company struggles to understand what we think of as the silent majority. The opportunity for communication is about reaching these people. These are the folks that you can actually move over here. If your business is spending most of its time and energy on this part of the curve, it should be obvious you’re focused in the incorrect place.

In your business most of your customers to some extent are happy. They’re using your app maybe once or twice a month. Those people that are somewhat happy that you communicate with and that you reach out to can be turned into loyal customers who are super profitable and are saying great things about you in the App Store.

What’s really valuable about this is when you change this equation and you stop focusing reactively on the people who are upset and start focusing proactively on the people who are not talking but moderately happy, your team will learn more. Your team will understand the majority of your customer base because they’re here and they’re silent. If you can reach out and get 20, 30, 50 percent of these people to talk to you, the communication that happens between your company and those customers will drive more loyal behavior, but importantly internally drive more of the right behavior. Because you’re going to be informed by the majority of your customer base as opposed to today where you’re informed by the minority.