Tips to get and manage the feedbacks of your users
You have developed a nice Windows Phone 7 application and after some quirks you get it to pass the certification (more on that later). But how can you handle the reviews and feedbacks about it? Since a lot of applications are developed by independent professionals like me, we don’t have a lot of marketing resources. It’s always heart-breaking to see a bad review, and it’s even more frustrating when you can’t offer your assistance (though I must confess that some users are beyond any help).
I use some simple tools, maybe more are available (I will update this post), but here are some tips:
Marketplace reviews: you can read the reviews from your country directly in Zune but it’s only your country. Tom Verhoeff has developed a very useful Silverlight application to access reviews from all Marketplaces around the world:
There are the averages for each market, the number of reviews and their details. One of the neat features is the link on the username: it brings you to the Zune website where you can contact the reviewer.
Twitter I use hootsuite but you can find this feature in your favorite Twitter client: saved searches, so you know who is talking about your app.
Analytics: I also integrated an analytics tool, mtiks, to be able to get some anonymous usage data like the most used features etc.
One of the missing part is maybe a way to gather the feedback of my user in a public website like http://getsatisfaction.com
But I’m not forgetting that the most important thing is to have a good application: user-friendly, snappy and robust.
Update: I forgot about App Tracker, an app for your phone, With it you can browse the reviews and ratings.
