Comparing Yammer And Salesforce Chatter With Deep Analytics From Applause

Applause is a new service that analyzes data from top app stores to help businesses understand how their mobile apps compare across user reviews from different marketplaces.

We looked at the Applause service in January. Developed by uTest, the Applause service is primarily a tool to compare how different branded apps are faring in the market. Platforms like this illustrate the way businesses are becoming ever more data-driven and highlight the need to look deeper at how apps compare when deciding which ones to use.

Applause analyzes data from the world’s top app stores. In its view, skimming three-star ratings and pages of app store reviews does not help very much in analyzing what improvements are needed to make an app a success. What results is a lot of guesswork, and the company says explicit analytics of mobile apps have become a massive blind spot.

Applause crawls every rating and review for an app, synthesizing user feedback into what it calls an Applause Score, which measures user satisfaction, app quality and how well it is faring in terms of the “applause” it is generating.

The Applause score considers all the past reviews of the app to make its ranking. Overall, the service pulls from 80 million reviews from the different store marketplaces. It weights the reviews within the app category and ranks them on a 0-100 scale. The past data determines the score, but only if there is sufficient data, underscoring the value of user reviews for analytics purposes. If there is not sufficient data, an app developer can use Applause to look at reviews and make comparisons to other similar apps. As scores are determined by reviews so it’s up to the app owner to find ways to get more reviews for proper ranking and updated reviews from people who may have been unhappy with a prior version of the app.

To illustrate, I asked the team at Applause to help compare two popular services in the enterprise: Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce Chatter. The analysis, from May, showed that Chatter’s reviews were better than Yammer’s.

applauserankings

However, since May, Yammer has improved its ranking, and Chatter is showing a drop in user satisfaction. Today, Yammer’s Applause score is up six points to 53 on the iOS platform. Its ranking increased from 29 to 32 on Android. Chatter has dropped six points on iOS to 56 and is down one on Android, scoring a 38 Applause ranking.

Applause is the kind of service that enterprise shops should be using to get analysis. Those that do pay attention can provide a better user experience, which is critical in today’s market.