Issue #6 - Practical tips to get reviews for your Shopify App

It’s a well known fact now reviews almost entirely come through Customer Support. The above meme is obviously an exaggeration (buggy apps will lead to uninstalls and drop in rank), there are much better ways to achieve it.

I have used this techniques to grow my app to 503 reviews as a one person customer support team?

Most store owners won’t reach out to support, they would try to figure out your app on their own or just uninstall and move onto another app. So it’s very important that your live chat app starts a conversation.

People don’t really like bots and would talk to chat support if they feel there is a real person on chat. So when you initiate a conversation, use your actual photo and don’t sound like a bot with something like “How can I help you?”.

Your message to initiate conversation should not sound like a bot and be clear about what they can get from you, give them direction, a push to where you want to take them.

e.g.

If your apps have no issues why would someone need customer support? The answer is customization.

Instead of adding 100 settings on dashboard to customize the look & feel and control every aspect of your app, keep the dashboard simple and handle extra bit of customization manually from backend though customer support.

It doesn’t mean that users should not be able to use the app on their own. You should have enough control settings on dashboard so that the app is lean and satisfies requirements for 95% of your users. Those 5% who need an extra bit of customization should be able to reach out to support for it.

This helps in 2 things, you app is really simple to use for 95% of users and they are able to set it up on their store really quick. You have a pool of 5% who could reach out to customer support and lead to potential reviews.

CSS is powerful, no matter how many settings you introduce in the dashboard, it would not cover what couple of lines additional CSS can do. This is specially true for widget based apps. 

Once you are able to add store specific CSS to your widget you can do any customization that the store owners ask for.

Do they need a rounded border or reduce padding here or increase margins over there etc. I had so many stores asking for certain hover animation - blur, black overlay, zoom-in etc. All these can be handled by a couple of lines of CSS, and the customer would be impressed enough to drop a review 😉

About 5% of my reviews aren’t from first interaction, but through follow ups through “Gentle reminder requests”. After a good support session you would carefully request them for a review on AppStore. But In cases when they don’t, just send a reminder the next day. Don’t be too pushy, but always follow up with a review request at least once.

Whenever a customer contacts you on customer support you need to reply within a minute. Most people would go away from chat in 2-3 mins and uninstall in 5-6 minutes.

You need to set your notifications such that you are able to reply it really fast. This can be handled easily through mobile or smart watch alerts. You don’t have to solve the issue immediately, just assure them that you are looking into it. This way they would not uninstall immediately and you get time to solve the issue when you get on the desktop. Though if you are able to solve it while they are on customer chat there are higher chances of converting a review.

At times when you know you are not able to reply immediately, change your conversation starter message to an away message that asks them to leave their support request on chat and you would look into it in a few hours. When the customer has this clarity, most of them are okay to wait for it.

Shopify Appstore relies too heavily on Reviews, you come to realize it more when 1-star reviews come into picture. So when someone leaves a 1-star rating, do whatever you can do to make them remove it or change it to 5-star.

Reply politely on the review and offer a solution, reach out to them over email and offer a solution, give them a refund if they want, offer to extend their trial etc. Do whatever it takes, but just ask them to remove the review (without being annoying).

Throughout my career working with Shopify apps, I must have been able to remove or convert at least 6 1-star reviews.

Feel free to write to me if you have any questions or feedback. If the above content has been helpful to you, it would be great if you could Tweet this newsletter :).