How to Improve Review Management & App Customer Support

To maintain a good brand reputation, it is crucial to effectively engage with your app users by responding to reviews.

However, many app developers don’t take the time to monitor or reply to reviews due to the inefficiency of the store consoles. Typically, this process can take a lot of time (especially for big teams needing high collaboration) and make it difficult to analyze the impact of your support.

Nonetheless, it is very important to engage with your reviews to understand users’ current frustrations and give future users a positive impression of your app. With the stores now also considering average ratings when promoting apps and games, your app store reputation is now more critical than ever.

We’ve built a complete tool that allows you to minimize the time spent on reviews while increasing user satisfaction and insights. Read this blog to learn all about App Reviews Manager and how this powerful tool can help you reach your customer support goals.

Goal: Quickly reply to high volumes of customer reviews

The scenario is all too familiar: an influx of reviews demanding responses, but time is limited. It’s a challenge to engage with each customer effectively while working on other customer support tasks.

When you do start replying, you face important decisions: Which reviews do I reply to? Which ones don’t need a response? Which store do I prioritize?

Learn how to respond to good and bad app reviews

The app store consoles provide limited ways to reply to reviews and extract useful insights. Saving time often means prioritizing 1- and 2-star reviews (which is already great because it can calm annoyed users and provide valuable product feedback).

However, by not replying to your 3-, 4-, and 5-star reviews, you’re also missing an opportunity to boost user engagement and loyalty. Don’t forget that even happy users can change a 4 to a 5-star rating, positively impacting your average rating in the long run.

Our advice: Leverage GPT-4 suggestions & bulk reply

Our built-in GPT-4 suggestions are an exceptional way to instantly generate human-like replies. This is great when you have high volumes of reviews about different topics, in different languages, or written with different tones.

Our AI will automatically analyze all reviews and provide custom suggestions for each one. You can choose the best tone for each reply (neutral, short, or formal) and decide to post these replies directly or further personalize them yourself beforehand.

For high volumes of reviews covering the same topic (e.g. a specific bug), it can be quite repetitive to keep explaining the same issue. In this case, you can craft a single response that effectively addresses their concerns, and use “bulk reply” to paste your reply to all selected reviews in seconds.

In the example below, we filtered our view to only see 4-star reviews. Here, we would like to thank users, understand why they didn’t provide a 5-star rating, and get feedback. With bulk reply, we can easily select 50 reviews to apply this reply to in a click, freeing up time for other tasks.

Goal: Tag product feedback in your app reviews

Some teams mainly work on reviews to collect insights and analyze product feedback. In this case, teams will want to categorize reviews to understand how frequently different topics are raised and report these findings to tech teams or management.

Read these 4 tips to monitor & manage your app reviews

This can be very time-consuming and will require you to navigate multiple tools. You might first have to export your reviews from the consoles. Then, you’ll need to analyze the different categories each review falls in, before aggregating your data to get actionable insights. Furthermore, the store consoles only allow you to check one country at a time which might not be ideal since feedback and bugs can be relevant across countries.

Our advice: Use filters & bulk tag reviews

Bulk tagging your reviews allows you to quickly understand where reviews are coming from and what they’re about. You can then share topics with relevant teams to help them resolve issues or leverage new insights.

First, use filters to display reviews talking about a specific topic (for instance, only display reviews containing the keywords “price”, “expensive,” “cheap,” or “value” to see any pricing feedback).

Once you’ve identified relevant keywords, we’ll gather all the reviews containing at least one of these words, allowing you to quickly tag them all with a simple “Pricing” label.

In the example above, we detected 18 reviews containing the keywords “price,” “expensive,” “cost,” or “pricing.” You can then come back to these reviews using the “tags” filter, to understand how relevant each topic is over time and easily report findings back to your team.

Tags can easily transform hundreds or thousands of reviews into just a few main themes. Here are just a few examples of tags you can implement in your strategy:

• Tag reviews mentioning customer support with “Support”
• Tag reviews mentioning “price,” “expensive,” or “cheap” with “Pricing”
• Tag reviews about a specific feature, request, or bug

Goal: Get quick access to reviews by language

Usually, teams in charge of replying to reviews will distribute their work based on language. This is a good strategy since replying in a customer’s preferred language can foster a deeper connection.

Our advice: Save filtered views by language on the App Store & Google Play

In App Reviews Manager, just select the language you want to work on. Then, save this filtered view and name it however you like. We’d recommend adding the agent’s name so the person responsible can quickly see the reviews they need to take care of.

Each view will be updated every time we get new reviews matching your filters. In other words, you won’t need to search for the reviews you’ll work on each time – just click your assigned saved view.

Save views depending on your team’s goals – for example, based on topic (e.g. “pricing”), country/region, app version, etc. We’d advise you to create as many views as necessary to help your support agents structure their work and quickly return to reviews to uncover specific insights.

AI in ASO: Developing a new model for mining user reviews

Goal: Align your support team’s strategy across markets

When you have a big support team, it can be a struggle to keep everyone aligned and ensure you’re all on the same page regarding your reply strategy.

Our advice: Write templates & save time with Template Shuffler

To solve this, we’d advise you to prepare strong reply templates that can be reused across your entire team (within the same AppTweak workspace). This way, you can leverage and adapt your own pre-written replies without needing to monitor every single reply posted.

Some teams will spend a lot of time creating templates that cover different tones for the same reply. For example, you might create multiple templates responding to frustrations about a specific bug so you don’t sound too robotic or like you’re copy-pasting each reply.

This is why we’ve developed the Template Shuffler. Simply select reviews that require similar replies, choose the correct folder, and let our Shuffler randomly assign templates to every review selected (don’t worry, we won’t assign the same template twice in a row if we have other templates lined up).

In the example above, we’ve selected all our different “thank you” templates for our 4- and 5-star reviews. As a result, each user will feel like you posted a personalized message just for them.

Goal: Analyze your app’s customer support impact

Replying to reviews is a nice first step, but it is more important to start monitoring impact and understanding the quality of your customer support work.

How do we measure the success of a reply? First, remember that a user’s perception of your app will be impacted by your reply. When users really feel heard and helped, they may consider changing their review/rating which can help increase your average ratings in the long run.

Our advice: Keep an eye on updated reviews & Reply Impact

There aren’t many tools in the app consoles that can help you assess impact. Instead, App Reviews Manager includes smart filters that will help you only display updated reviews. Based on the history of each review, you can understand better what triggered these updates.

To determine if your replies have had a direct impact on specific reviews, you can use the “updated after reply” filter. This will allow you to see all the reviews that were changed within a month after your reply. After this time, we prefer not to suggest a direct link between the review update and your reply.

In many cases, we see that replying to user frustrations (e.g. by letting them know a feature is on its way or has been fixed) can lead to the user updating their rating.

It is great to look at each updated review (and its history) to grasp the real idea behind each update. To get a high-level understanding of impact, you can also keep an eye on the KPIs at the top of the interface, as these will automatically update based on your filters.

Understand the impact of ratings & reviews on app visibility

As a manager, it is also important to make sure your support is reaching all markets. Depending on your goals, you might want to allocate resources to a specific country or language to make sure every review gets a reply.

If you’re looking for further insights into your support impact, the Reply Impact section allows you to easily see which agents are replying to reviews in specific countries, how many reviews have been left without replies, and more aggregated information. Depending on your analysis, you can check which market needs more resources, better inform key decisions, and optimize your team.

For instance, we can see above all the agents actively replying to our reviews in Belgium, alongside the number of reviews without replies and more KPIs. We can then compare our reply performance to another key market (e.g. the US) or filter our analysis down for specific star ratings.

This view also shows how many reviews were updated after each agent’s replies. This can indicate whose approach is working best at impacting your users.

Goal: Fit an App Reviews Manager in your current workflow

Transitioning to new tools often raises concerns about workflow disruption: it can demand a lot of time, energy, and resources. Our App Reviews Manager seamlessly integrates with familiar CRM platforms, mitigating such disruptions.

Most of our users use (at least one of) 3 support tools on a daily basis: Salesforce, Zendesk, and/or Slack. These 3 tools all allow you to centralize your customer support and reply to your users across channels.

Our advice: Integrate AppTweak with Salesforce, Zendesk, or Slack

In AppTweak, easily integrate your preferred CRM platform to receive all the reviews fetched from your app consoles directly in Salesforce, Zendesk, or Slack. Your app store reviews will be shown in the same way as any other ticket, helping to minimize any platform adoption time.

You can decide to receive all your reviews in your CRM platform, or you can only receive reviews in a certain language, with a specific star rating, or any other segmentation. You can also choose which Slack channels you’d like to receive reviews in, allowing you to share reviews with your most relevant teams.

Conclusion

Managing app reviews is crucial to maintaining a positive brand reputation. Reply to your reviews regardless of their rating to increase user engagement and extract useful feedback directly from your users.

With App Reviews Manager, AppTweak helps to streamline this process with AI-powered reply suggestions and bulk tools to save valuable time. The platform allows you to centralize, distribute, and monitor reviews, helping to upgrade your support team’s organization and resource allocation. Smart filters and KPIs also allow you to measure reply impact, while CRM integrations ensure a seamless workflow.

Get 50 replies included with any AppTweak plan – or choose the App Reviews Manager package that best suits your team.

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