Users spoke, Citizen listened: Tuning in to customer feedback to improve app experience

Designed to help you feel safer at home or while you're out in public, the Citizen app gives users real-time safety alerts and live videos of incidents happening in the area. This also includes updates on natural disasters or protests and information on whether or not your loved ones are near a dangerous incident. 

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As an app that’s focused on individual and community safety, the stakes to “get it right” are high. Citizen relies heavily on feedback from their users to make sure they're on the right path. 

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With millions of active users, customer feedback was never in short supply—but evaluating it and identifying tangible patterns became increasingly difficult. While searching for a tool that might help, they came across Unwrap.ai and never looked back. 

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App store reviews alone couldn’t capture the full picture

Since the company's inception, the product team at Citizen has emphasized the importance of customer reviews from app stores. 

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“We actually read every single app store review, and have since the beginning of the company. We would receive reviews that seemed to share similar sentiments or pain points, but it was difficult to group those together and draw definitive conclusions—especially over time.” -Jonathan Rhome, Head of product, Citizen

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Once they implemented Zendesk for customer support, manually identifying trends in feedback only became more complex.   

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“Data from the customer support side of the business was sometimes a little opaque or vague. What we really wanted to know was not necessarily the most high-touch or consistent issues—those we’re aware of—but rather we wanted to know when feedback shifts.”

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Plus, because Citizen is a digital-first business, talking to customers is often difficult. They rely on digital tools to help them better incorporate user feedback into the app, and prior to Unwrap their process for doing so wasn’t making the grade. 

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“Obviously we look into data analytics a lot, but what we realized is we needed to be able to parse the qualitative data at scale too.”

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How bringing together disparate sources of customer feedback filled in the data gaps  

Once merged in Unwrap, the app store and Zendesk data together began to paint a clearer picture of what features or issues mattered to Citizen users—and the product team could pinpoint exactly when it began to matter. 

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“In Unwrap, we spotted a spike in users reporting that they didn't receive their pin codes when they were trying to log into the app. Within 24 hours, we fixed that technical issue. But as we began to plan future roadmaps, we uncovered other patterns of users having difficulty with phone number or email verification.” 

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The benefit? Both short-term and long-term fixes were addressed, much to the delight of current and new users.   

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“It really motivated us to move away from that style of verification—and actually implement sign in with Apple. We ended up increasing our number of new users by about 6% overnight, just by introducing that alternative way to sign in.” 

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Validating the right and wrong paths to take during product enhancement 

Making data-backed roadmap decisions that were profitable to the business wasn't the only way Unwrap was able to boost performance. It also allowed the product team to validate changes to their alerting algorithm. 

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Citizen wants to make their users feel safe, but it’s a balancing act knowing how far is too far when it comes to notifying users about what’s going on in their area. Too many notifications stir up an unnecessary amount of fear, so the product team set out to fine tune their algorithm. 

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“We were able to get near real-time feedback from our app store reviews and our customer support data that we were sending notifications about incidents too far away in certain treatments of our test.”

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Adjusting their algorithm allowed the team to retain more users, while not prompting undue anxiety about situations that weren’t relevant. 

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“As we tracked the changes to our algorithm against the changes in feedback trends, we easily spotted when we made a mistake. Typically, we see around 5 reports a week of users saying they’re receiving incident notifications outside of the area they’re interested in. But then one week, in Unwrap, we saw it spike to about 100 pieces of feedback.” 

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Once they made the adjustment, Unwrap helped them further prove that refining their algorithm at that moment in time had the desired downstream effect on their users. 

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“We could track the decline in those complaints and correlate it to a decline in users deleting our app—verifying that the algorithm change we made worked.” 

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The future is bright—and full of more feedback sources that Citizen plans to bring into Unwrap

Unwrap has strengthened the product team’s ability to make decisions based on qualitative data and to demonstrate that they’re making the right app improvements to keep users around.

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“It's one thing for someone in an organization to point to a specific support ticket or app store review and say, ‘Look, this user is having a problem.’ It doesn’t carry enough weight. But if you're able to point to a dashboard that shows hundreds of users are having a similar problem, that really motivates the organization to prioritize correctly.” 

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Citizen has no plans to slow down. They want to continue to build a comprehensive view of their customers through feedback data and pull in additional sources—wherever users are providing it. 

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‍“I'd really like to use Unwrap to fully put my ear to the ground and figure out how the world is talking about Citizen as a consumer app. From social media platforms like X or Instagram, or even Reddit, I want that data in Unwrap to deeply understand how people are thinking about us, what our sentiment in the market is, and learn what we can do inside the company and as a product to push the envelope for our users.” 

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