Four sample mobile application optimization workflows.

Mobile application optimization is a crucial step for organizations looking to take their mobile applications to the next level.

In our mobile-first world, simply building a native or hybrid application isn’t enough. Today’s customers expect a user experience that is on par with Amazon or social media apps like Twitter. 

Now more than ever, organizations need mobile data analytics tools to better understand and empathize with their customers. 

In this blog, we share four ways better mobile analytics can improve your workflows and create better experiences for customers. 

Identify customer friction in your mobile application. 

Think about the last time you had a bad experience on a mobile app. 

Did your mobile banking app freeze when you went to check your bank account balance? Were you reading the news, and realized the app hadn’t been updated since last week?

Mobile app designers and developers want to build apps that meet customers’ needs. Yet the reality is: confusing UX and technical errors are inevitable when you’re constantly optimizing and pushing new app releases.

That’s why the teams building apps need to know ASAP when friction is occurring. 

But, to effectively prioritize and identify optimizations, you also want to know why it happened, how many customers were impacted, and if there was a negative business impact . What you don’t want is to find out about customer friction from negative reviews in the app store, skyrocketing uninstalls, and plummeting revenues.

To understand why customers behave the way they do requires a deeper look into their behavior while using apps. Looking at dashboards full of charts and graphs might tell you when and where a customer is struggling, but it won’t tell you why. 

This is why the ability to witness customer struggles through session replay is so critical. Until recently, this ability was limited to the web. Today, brands are using session replay on native apps as well. Paired with analytics and performance data on the app, session replay completes the 360-view of mobile app behavior with a powerful story about what is confusing users or causing customer friction.

A sample mobile application optimization workflow:

• Step 1. Anomaly detection. Receive an alert that customers are experiencing unusual levels of friction after the latest mobile app version update.
• Step 2. Mobile analytics. Segment which users are impacted, e.g., by device and OS type, and see how many users are impacted.
• Step 3. Mobile session replay. Watch a few replays to instantly identify a newly designed feature that is confusing customers and causing them to abandon.

Identify conversion-blockers in revenue-generating mobile application flows.

With some apps, conversions equal revenue and company growth. For retail apps, airline apps, and more, the bottom line is directly linked to customer experience. A bumpy path to conversion means more drop-offs, less recurring revenue, and degraded customer loyalty.

Teams maintaining these apps need to identify and remove friction in real time. 

And it’s not just about sales — it’s about encouraging customers to spend more money, right from their phones. Consider upsell flows like airline seat upgrades, in-flight Wi-Fi packages, or car rental add-ons. These ancillary services can be highly profitable. Wi-Fi alone is expected to generate $30 billion by 2035. 

However, these services are also highly dependent on a standout mobile user experience. An annoyed customer may have to purchase a core product but won’t go the extra step to respond to upselling.

A sample mobile application optimization workflow:

• Step 1. Anomaly detection. Receive an alert that drop off rates for an upsell flow are below the range of normal.
• Step 2. Mobile analytics. See exactly where in the funnel drop-off or friction is occurring and identify the segment(s) most impacted.
• Step 3. One-touch quantification. Quantify the potential lost revenue impact to determine if a fix should be escalated or added to the backlog.

Reduce time to remediate high-severity mobile application issues.

As pressure mounts to increase agility and iterate faster on mobile, it’s inevitable something won’t work as intended, no matter how much testing you do. 

But the stakes are higher for app releases, since every release requires app store review and approval, which can take days or sometimes weeks. That’s in addition to the time for your teams to investigate and resolve the issue. 

In a large-scale digital enterprise, where just a couple minutes of downtime can translate to millions of dollars in lost revenue, a few days can seem like a lifetime. This is why mobile analytics are so important. 

By detecting frustration and receiving alerts with actionable insights, you can reduce the time to remediate and fix severe issues for mobile users. With Quantum Metric’s Experience Alerts, companies can set up alerts on key workflows, such as order tracking and checkout. Your team can receive alerts if there are unusual levels of technical issues (slow pages) or signs of friction (rage taps). 

A sample mobile application optimization workflow:

• Step 1. “Possible frustration” alert to mobile product team. Product manager is instantly notified that customers are struggling on the checkout screen.
• Step 2. Review customer sessions. Product manager opens the alert, watches the replay, and sees the customer struggling to complete checkout. 
• Step 3. DevOps notified with technical details. Engineers see the issue in real time and review technical details showing the exact bug at checkout.
• Step 4. Fix prioritized and released. Within hours, the fix is identified and prioritized for an emergency app release.

Improve employee productivity and satisfaction.

Beyond customer-facing apps, internal-facing mobile apps help employees complete tasks and better serve their customers. Examples include apps for flight attendants to manage airline boarding, store associates to drive retail point of sale, or restaurant employees to manage orders. 

All these, and many more, are as critical to the mobile value chain as customer-facing apps. When employees encounter friction in mobile apps — they suffer and their customers suffer. This leads to a simultaneous drop in both customer and employee satisfaction. The faster friction in employee mobile apps can be identified and mitigated, the better for workforce retention, reputation, and profitability.

A sample mobile application optimization workflow:

• Step 1. Agent opens a ticket. An agent has an issue boarding an airplane passenger. He logs a ticket.
• Step 2. Helpdesk views the session. A helpdesk engineer opens the ticket, watches the mobile session replay, and sees the agent struggling with an error message. 
• Step 3. Helpdesk sends to Engineering. Engineering watches a few replays and looks at technical data to instantly identify an API failure that needs to be remediated.

Wanting to learn more about how Quantum Metric can help build standout mobile experiences?

Request a demo today.

You can also check out our guide for finding the best mobile analytics platform.