Harish Srigiriraju has carved a niche in the field of Product Analytics by uncovering critical insights on user engagement.  He is currently working at one of the world’s leading telecom companies where he has developed numerous analytical models that have made a huge impact on products.

One such model is leveraging In-App Feedback to personalize the home screen for mobile applications.

Harish highlights that App Store ratings provide very limited insights on customer needs. There is no information on the users and their history of association with the product, therefore the analytics is restricted to broad trends without real actionable insights. Moreover, the reviews given by the users are often not insightful. There is an adverse selection, as unhappy users are more likely to take the effort to give a rating on the app stores.

Due to these limitations from App Store ratings, Harish points out that In-App ratings are valuable for product managers. In-App ratings are provided while using the application and are different from the ones on the App Store.  A user can be prompted to give a rating and a review after using a specific feature within the application. Various analytical tools track user engagement but none of them provide comprehensive insights based on in-app ratings. Therefore, he collected the raw data and ran various models to uncover customer preferences not just for the overall app but for specific features as well. He then uses these insights to make significant improvements to the applications.

Apart from uncovering user preferences, Harish used in-app ratings to develop a novel approach to personalize the entire home screen. Based on the rating provided for each feature, his model will determine the order of the features on the home screen. Moreover, happy users can potentially be shown promotions to upgrade while those at risk of deactivating can be shown features that reinforce the value of the product. To accommodate this level of personalization, he worked with engineering and design teams to develop the User Interface with design components that can easily be configured. These are a few examples of many such models he was able to develop to personalize the experience for the user.

With such a wide range of benefits, product leaders should certainly use in-app ratings to better understand their user base, make impactful changes to the app and run personalized campaigns.