Big business treats customer relations very seriously.

After all, keeping the customer satisfied is the basis of longterm success.

It's much harder to do in the app ecosystem as the app store is your shopfront and direct communication is limited.

And that's the issue that US start up Apptentive is looking to solve.

Its tools enable developers to open up communications channels to their uses in-app and across platforms.

We caught up with CEO Robi Ganguly to find out more.

Pocket Gamer: Why did you start up Apptentive and what problem does it solve?

Robi Ganguly: We started Apptentive because our three original founders (Mike, Andrew and myself) all had experience with app stores, app development and customer communication.

We saw that the app stores were an awesome opportunity for publishers to get distribution, but that they were the last place to have a conversation with your customer.

In addition to ratings and reviews being public and anonymous, app publishers don't get any information about the people who download their apps and have to build their own homegrown registration and CRM capabilities if they want to establish relationships with their customers.

We thought we could build tools and services that would solve these problems and enable developers to focus their time and effort on making the best apps possible.

How does it work?

Simple integration takes about 15 minutes and requires the app publisher to integrate our SDKs for iOS, Android or Mac OS X into their app.

Our customers make a few decisions at the outset, such as when to display a "contact us" or "give us feedback" button that triggers our feedback dialog boxes and then build their app and publish it in the app stores. Once their app is live, they're able to manage all feedback in an inbox specific to their app on our site.

Importantly, they can view analysis of all of the communications activity in their apps, modify their settings, respond and collect the aggregate information about all of their customers all without having to ship updates to their apps.

There's a lot of focus in the industry on app store ratings. Are these still useful?

Yes, absolutely. It's important to understand that an app's page in the app store is really akin to its storefront: it's where conversion occur (or don't, as the case may be).

From our research and work with third party app stores, we're seeing that the conversion rate of free apps is less than 33 percent - which is to say that of the people who view an app's page, less than 1 in 3 people actually choose to download the app. The conversion rates are much worse for paid apps.

The key driver of these conversion decisions are the app's ratings and reviews, because they're the most dynamic and authentic component of the app store page. So, making sure that you're putting your best foot forward should be an area of emphasis for every developer.

In addition, the ratings are a signal to each of the app stores about how consumers are receiving an app - both the volume and the absolute rating are important to the algorithms for surfacing apps.

With Google Play integrating such features, do you worry that other app stores will eventually squeeze you out of business?

What we've seen is that as Google Play is introducing the public response mechanisms for some developers, interest in our services from Android developers has grown. Our understanding, in talking with these developers, is that it's made the challenge of public customer conversations more apparent and that enabling private, in-app communication mechanisms is becoming more important over time.

It's also important to note that most successful app publishers are now developing for two platforms or more, making each platform's ratings and review section a specific silo that is more difficult to manage.

Because our service allows you to manage multiple apps at the same time and provides consistent tools and reporting, the teams tasked with customer communication at each company are able to more efficient when they're using us.

Finally, because we assist in the ratings prompts, qualifying consumer sentiment and powering in-app surveys, our capabilities far exceed what app stores are interested in providing, driving a lot of interest for our services.

What the take up been like so far?

In short, it's been a steady and promising growth rate.

At first, when we started building our services in 2011, our capabilities were somewhat limited and visibility was small. As we've continued to flesh out our product offering and engage in a lot of customer development, we've rolled out more capabilities that are driving really meaningful results customers, both small and large and our customers have shared our services with their peers and the press.

We're proud of the fact that companies like Urbanspoon and Yahoo! have decided to work with us and are really encouraged by the fact that hundreds of independent developers have register and gotten up and running in a completely self-service manner.

Your pricing is pretty cheap. How do you expect to make money?

Pricing is really a function of understanding how much value we can provide for various capabilities. We believe that there are various tiers of service that are appropriate for customers.

At the $20/month level we know that there are large populations of developers who are gaining a lot of value from our tools and that we can service them in an affordable manner. It's important to us to be approachable for the independent market.

At the corporate and enterprise tiers, the data, service and feature requirements are much heavier, which is why we charge more at those levels and we're seeing that large publishers with dozens of apps are deriving a lot of value from our services at monthly rates per app.

Importantly, there are other companies in the app services space who favour advertising as a model and we believe that charging for our services is the right way to build our business, in order to not find ourselves competing with our customers for the attention of the people using their apps.

What's next for Apptentive?

We're really excited to be a part of the current TechStars Seattle class, where we're benefiting from an extraordinary network of mentors and investors helping us really accelerate our growth. We have a really ambitious product roadmap geared towards solving the numerous problems companies face in building more meaningful customer relationships.

Ultimately, we're trying to build a company that makes it easy to develop personal, highly relevant relationships with your customers through software and we're excited to truly enable companies to earn the love of their customers.

Thanks to Robi for his time.

You can check out what Apptentive gets up to via its website.