Signal in the Noise: Restoring App Experience Baseline in Minutes

We’ll show you how a fictional home improvement retailer uses Digital Experience Analytics for mobile apps to detect and fix a bug that’s negatively affecting the customer experience.

As part of our series highlighting our Frontline-Ready AI™ features, we’ll explore the key use cases and benefits of Digital Experience Analytics for mobile apps. 

Building on Medallia’s Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), DXA for mobile analyzes every behavior and technical experience signal into intelligence to create and deliver better experiences.

Ahead, we’ll show you the solution in action. You’ll see how a fictional home improvement retailer, GoodHome, uses DXA for mobile to monitor their digital experience score, identify an error that’s causing user frustration to spike, and resolve the issue—all within minutes. 

Let’s dive in. 

The Character and the Conflict

Meet Taylor, the Digital CX Manager at GoodHome.

Her retail company’s apps and websites have hundreds of millions of users annually, and she knows that every swipe, scroll, form fill, hover, and tap across the digital experience tells a story. Collectively, these digital behaviors reveal what’s fueling sales, repeat visits, and longer-term loyalty. 

The GoodHome team has been using Medallia DXA for their websites, and recently enabled DXA for their mobile app for a complete view of the digital customer journey. 

Digital Experience Analytics for mobile apps offers a balanced user experience score, highlights top friction points for prioritization and associated action recommendations, visualizes and summarizes the customer journey by page or across every page to enable action, and triggers alerts and workflows to ensure that action happens.

The Moment of Truth

Things have been going well for GoodHome’s digital channels. Really well. There’s been a 30% increase in purchases made through their app this year. 

But Taylor knows that even the smallest bump in the digital experience has the potential to derail customers from successfully completing their journeys.

That’s why now that she has access to DXA for mobile apps, she’s constantly keeping tabs on her brand’s Digital Experience Score (DXS), an AI rules-based score that evaluates activity and events online across five key pillars—engagement, technical performance, form effectiveness, frustration, and navigation—to produce a 0-10 perspective on the health of the experience.

Turns out, GoodHome’s overall DXS has recently dropped by a staggering 3.7 points, from a 7.8 out of 10 to a failing 4.1 out of 10. The main driver? The brand’s frustration score is getting worse. Much worse. Customer frustration with the app is at a high of 8.4 out of 10, and unlike every other pillar, you do not want a high score here!

The Solution: Digital Experience Analytics for Mobile Apps in Action

In the past, the GoodHome team might have remained in the dark about what was happening for mobile app customer experiences for hours or days until survey responses, negative reviews, and contact center emails, calls, and live chat sessions spiked. 

Now, anyone with permission at the retailer can see what’s happening by drilling into the details available for each DXS pillar to identify root cause experience issues and pages where improvement is needed most. 

They can also size the affected customer journeys and view an experience. And CX teams can drive the change without having to wait for busy data scientists and technologists to engage in lengthy data investigation. 

When Taylor views the details for the frustration score, she can see that the top driver of frustration is unresponsive touches, with 39K instances occurring recently. From her Medallia self-service training—and personal experience—she knows nothing is more frustrating than when something is clicked or interacted with and doesn’t do anything.

Taylor also sees that the page in the mobile application causing the most frustration is the ‘My Order’ page available within the ‘Account’ section of the app.

Diving deeper to understand why this is happening, Taylor knows she has an easy path to see any and all experiences where this frustration was shown, but she isolates it to just those on the page in question. 

Each session comes with everything she could ever want to know about the device, the customer, and their journey across the mobile app. Taylor even has the ability to replay the session and walk in the digital shoes of the customer based on the depth of data captured by Medallia Digital Experience Analytics. 

But actually, she sees everything she needs in the AI-generated summary about this customer’s experience.

In this case, she discovers that unresponsive touches are happening on the “My Orders” screen of the GoodHome app, where those unresponsive touches are actually due to a native app error—a technical issue—as users like this one are trying to check on their pickup orders. DXA reporting reveals that once a customer’s order status changes to “processing,” a bug is occurring that is preventing users from reviewing, changing, canceling, or checking on the status of their orders.

And even though the overall technical pillar score for the mobile app was great—suggesting product management and development teams might not have cause for concern—Taylor knows better based on just how much frustration is happening here. She has all the evidence to partner with her colleagues to return the GoodHome app back to a level of technical and experience excellence their customers expect.

The Resolution and Business Impact

If left unresolved, this type of app error can have ripple effects across the business. Impacted customers will likely end up reaching out to customer support for help or showing up in person to check on the status of their orders, an added operational burden—and cost for the retailer. 

Increased expenses aren’t the only concern. Broken experiences can erode customer trust and loyalty leading to less repeat activity or even no future engagement at all. In fact, a Medallia Market Research study, Latest Trends on the Digital Customer Experience, finds that 51% of customers say that in the past, they have stopped being a customer of a company because of encountering too many difficulties using their website or mobile app. So GoodHome doesn’t just stand to lose app users but actually potential forever customers without action.

But thanks to using DXA for mobile apps to monitor what’s happening with GoodHome’s app, Taylor is able to share her findings with the app developers, who are then able to push out a fix, and create a score-based alert program to provide proactive behavioral experience insights for future improvement and innovation opportunities. All within minutes.

See Medallia’s Digital Experience Analytics for Mobile Apps in Action

Watch our Digital Experience Analytics for mobile apps demo to discover how this new solution enables you to turn taps, swipes, focused attention, and errors into meaningful customer insights to deliver experiences that reduce friction, increase engagement, and generate sustainable revenue.