4 ways to get Health & Fitness mobile apps in shape for the New Year

Jan 6, 2023
By David Kravets
4 ways to get Health & Fitness mobile apps in shape for the New Year

Organizations will see a jump in issues impacting the quality of the user experience in their Health & Fitness apps at a critical time in the sales cycle — the New Year when current customers and new ones are promising to keep their resolutions to get physically and mentally fit, according to a unitQ analysis.

Our analysis of 259,000 user reviews of 500 of the top Health & Fitness apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store discovered customer-churning issues impacting every touchpoint of the customer journey, as well as blemishing mission-critical features only Health & Fitness apps can deliver. Our study of customer-churning issues in workout, meditation, and counseling apps during the 2022 New Year’s resolution frenzy found spikes in unsatisfactory customer support, and increased complaints about faulty weight, step and calorie-counting errors. What’s more, there were app freezing issues, installation problems and customers saying they were wrongly charged during free trials — all correctable problems despite organizations’ best intentions.

BELOW: The percentage increase for major issues impacting the quality of the customer experience that users of Health & Fitness apps complained about in Apple App Store and Google Play Store reviews from two weeks before to two weeks after New Year’s Day of 2022:

blog image

*To produce the results of this analysis, unitQ ingested user feedback from the top 500 Health & Fitness apps in the Apple and Google app stores and parsed the feedback through our advanced AI, machine learning and proprietary algorithms.

These disastrous quality-of-life issues happened despite Health & Fitness organizations anticipating increased demand for their applications from people promising to change their lifestyles in the New Year. It’s no secret that New Year’s resolutions often center around eating better, sleeping more, and getting into  physical and mental shape. Statista found that 23% of 2022 resolutions were promises of “living healthier” with another 20% of respondents saying they wanted to lose weight. 

When the consumer experience suffers for any mobile applications, users may respond by jumping ship to another application. Unhappy customers may voice their complaints on social media and leave negative comments in app store reviews.

Half of users polled won’t do business with a company unless it has at least a four-star rating. Nearly three quarters of users won’t buy a product before they’ve read the reviews.

This is why it’s imperative that organizations prepare for the onslaught of new and returning customers they know is coming. But winning over customers, especially in the saturated Health & Fitness category, takes more than organizations simply anticipating and preparing for friction points along the customer journey.

To avoid losing customers to competitors, organizations must not let customer-churning issues to persist. The first step in not allowing them to linger is finding out about them in real time, as they are happening.

Analyze Voice-of-the-Customer data to see trends, emerging problems

An organization’s user base is their best resource for acquiring a real-time awareness of issues that are spoiling the customer experience. Customers see everything, from every bug and update in every language and configuration, and on every single platform and device. User feedback is available in app store reviews, social media, Twitter, Reddit, Zendesk, Discord, chatbots, and other channels, including support tickets.

This is the Voice of the Customer. When leveraged correctly, organizations can paint a clear picture of what features customers enjoy, what they find hard to use or broken, and what bugs should be prioritized. Detecting, investigating, prioritizing and fixing issues identified by users bolsters KPIs, enhances customer satisfaction and ratings in app stores, attracts new users and reduces customer churn. Best of all, understanding the Voice of the Customer drives new revenue streams. Accessing, and making sense of the Voice of the Customer, in real time, is essential for an organization’s brand reputation.

Unlock AI to scale Voice-of-the-Customer analysis efforts

In today’s crowded app landscape, an exceptional user experience is essential for success. Utilizing machine learning and AI technology to capture user feedback in real-time from multiple sources can help companies gain a deep and personal understanding of their customers and ensure that issues that impact the customer experience are identified and corrected immediately. Embracing AI can help protect and improve brand reputation, increase user engagement and increase sales.

Unlock the potential of AI to scale your feedback analysis efforts and take your customer insights to the next level. Harness the power of AI-driven analytics to gain deeper insights into customer sentiment and make data-driven decisions to improve customer experience. Leverage AI-powered algorithms to quickly and accurately analyze customer feedback and discover patterns, trends, and correlations that would otherwise remain hidden. Becoming a user-centric organization requires utilizing AI models to monitor customer feedback in real time and proactively take action to ensure customer satisfaction.

Say goodbye to manually processing customer reviews left on app stores, social media, Reddit, Twitter, Discord and you name it. The manual process to parse user feedback, sentiment, and product-related issues leaves the door open for error, doesn’t account for languages, and takes way too long.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, can help companies gain a better understanding of customer issues, then quickly address them, wherever users leave customer reviews. This is critical for customer retention and obtaining new ones. By using machine learning and AI to capture customer feedback in real-time from multiple sources, companies can quickly identify and address issues impacting customer experience. 

Motivate teams to improve the customer journey

By harnessing AI-powered technology and Voice-of-the-Customer feedback, organizations can make data-driven decisions at every point in the customer journey to ensure an outstanding experience. And by rallying teams around what matters most to users, organizations can ensure that their products, services, and experiences are as user-friendly and effective as possible. This can be accomplished by developing a shared understanding of the user’s needs and wants, leveraging user feedback and research to inform product decisions, and creating an environment in which an organization’s teams are motivated to continuously improve the user experience across every touchpoint of the customer journey. Additionally, teams should prioritize user-centered design, testing, and iteration throughout the development process to ensure that the product as a whole meets user expectations.

All of this results in providing more personalized customer service, developing better user experiences, improving product features, and offering helpful tips, resources and incentives to keep customers engaged. In the end, a successful customer journey rests on organizations utilizing a customer feedback loop to collect valuable insights from users, and by using customers to inform product and service improvements to help drive sales and enhance the user experience.

Invest in a Voice-of-the-Customer platform

Organizations are investing substantial resources in the development and maintenance of their tech stacks. Auditing, security monitoring, application performance tracking, microsystems and other tools are being deployed to ensure continued success. However, for sustainable growth and customer loyalty, companies should also include a Voice-of-the-Customer platform as part of their stack. Voice-of-the-Customer data provides real-time insights into user experience, performance, features and capabilities. When analyzed with AI, this data can provide organizations with a competitive edge.

About unitQ

unitQ is an advanced Voice-of-the-Customer platform that provides AI-powered insights from user feedback to help you craft high-quality products, services and experiences. 

Ōura, a leading wearable health platform, has harnessed unitQ to enhance the customer experience and to build tighter collaboration between support, product, and hardware teams.

“unitQ’s intelligent topic categorizations and sentiment analysis let us cover more user feedback than we ever could before. That user feedback data then helps us identify and prioritize the issues most critical to users without having to manually read through thousands of tickets and posts,” says Jens Nordgaard, Data Analyst, CX Solutions & Insights, at Ōura. Read Ōura’s customer story.

Category-leading companies like Spotify, Bumble, Pinterest, Chime, HelloFresh and others rely on unitQ to drive growth, reduce churn, and build brand loyalty. Want to know what users think about your app? Get a free AI-driven CX report. To learn more about unitQ, request a demo.

Related Resources

unitQ: A pathway to fulfilling new corporate AI mandates
Blog
Apr 3, 2024

unitQ: A pathway to fulfilling new corporate AI mandates

Read Nowchevron_right
A slam dunk playbook for sports betting apps to boost March Madness revenue with unitQ
Blog
Mar 12, 2024

A slam dunk playbook for sports betting apps to boost March Madness revenue with unitQ

Read Nowchevron_right
Beyond machine signals: Why observability stacks require human, customer feedback
Blog
Feb 20, 2024

Beyond machine signals: Why observability stacks require human, customer feedback

Read Nowchevron_right

Get a demo - with your data!

Join category‑leading companies and start driving growth, reducing churn, and building loyalty with unitQ.

Get a demo - with your data!

Join category‑leading companies and start driving growth, reducing churn, and building loyalty with unitQ.