It’s always a funny thing when you find a problem you weren’t expecting – especially when spending time with usage data, taking a moment to blink once or twice and consider why something looks odd can really bear dividends.

When doing a fairly standard rundown of the support statistics for our in-app support, I noticed that, despite making up about 40% of our userbase, our Android app users were submitting as many support requests as our iOS users. This meant that an Android user was almost twice as likely to contact support as an iOS user.

This seemed strange – I did some digging. Was the Android app more difficult to use? The app store rating for the Android app was actually higher than that of the iOS app. It was also noteworthy that the Android users accessed the in-app FAQ about half as much as iOS users – perhaps for some reason Android users tended to speed past the FAQ and go directly to support? Perhaps the FAQ wasn’t displaying properly?

Like anyone feeling stumped, I brought the question to the team, hoping someone would find some insight where I didn’t – and it turned out that our Android application in fact offered more points of access to support than the iOS app – that is, the Android app offered folks a chance to reach support at points of failure and error messages, whereas the iOS device did not. All of these additional access points did not require a customer to go through the usual flow of FAQ before reaching out to support.

Mystery solved. We’re increasing the number of access points to support in the iOS app.

Working on the mobile apps has revealed to me again and again that the lower the barrier to entry is, the better you’ll be able to hear from your customers. They have a lot of valuable things to say – given the opportunity, they’ll help you to make better things.

If you’re keeping track, yes, this is the second story about working with the mobile team where I end up increasing the number of incoming support requests. Yes, I am the worst.

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