Cisco's Webex ($CSCO) and Zoom ($ZM) are clear beneficiaries of everyone working from home this month. The telecommunication industry is one of the few businesses poised to come out of the global pandemic stronger than it did going into it, as companies around the world question if it's really necessary to work out of an office anymore.
The one downside to massive amounts of workers using your product for the first time is there's going to be an influx of reviews, and not all of them are going to be positive, as seen in our ratings data for both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
In less than a month, five thousand new reviews popped up for Webex on the Apple App Store, which was able to vault the average rating to 3.5/5.
The same cannot be said for the Google Play Store, where the average review score went down. The number of reviews cracked 300,000, and yet the average score has been steadily dropping every month. Last year, it had a 4/5, and now it's about to hit that 3.5/5 seen on the Apple App Store.
Zoom has also seen a surge of reviews recently, but unfortunately, it came at a slight cost. Zoom had the all-impressive 5/5 average in February, but it recently fell back down to earth, at a pedestrian 4.5/5.
The only inexplicable data point we found was on the Google Play Store, aka the wild west of lawless user reviews. Last week saw the same spike in reviews, but the rating went down to a paltry 2.3/5 until buoying back up to 3.6/5. It was at 4.4/5 back in February. Is this a real cause for concern, or just simply the hit you take when getting your platform out to as many people working from home as possible?
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.