Back when I was the Director of Product for the Booking.com mobile app, I used to obsess over our app’s rating in the App Store and Play Store. But no matter how many new features and improvements we shipped, the rating would always hover around the same number. We learned something very important: by consistently responding to app store reviews and following up on user feedback we were able to meaningfully boost our app’s rating.
Not only did it improve customer satisfaction because people got a response from our team (and sometimes a bug fix!), being diligent about going through these reviews also helped us identify bugs and trending issues.
Over time, we evolved our process for reviewing and responding to app store reviews. Here are some of my learnings with a few best practices that I can highly recommend to any team developing mobile apps:
- Notify a team member right away: Assign someone on your team to manage the response when a review comes in. Ideally, they’re notified where they are used to working (email, Slack, etc.)
- Triage the review: Determine what action is required from the review - will a simple response suffice? Or should a bug or feature request be filed? If so, log it in your system for that.
- Use AI to draft a reply: Leverage the power of AI to draft a response to the review, this saves valuable time by providing a starting point.
- Double check the response: Have a team member double check the response drafted by AI and make any tweaks or personalizations before posting
- Close the loop with the customer: The most important part! Make sure you respond to the customer to let them know you’ve heard them and taken action accordingly.
When the volume of reviews is very high, you might want to prioritize looking at reviews getting 3 stars or less. By the way, did I mention all of this should ideally happen within hours not days? Get back to the user right away while this is top of mind for them, it will make a difference!
If you’re looking for a tool to help you manage this process from end to end (assigning a team member to triage, leveraging AI, looping in a human to double check, etc.), Relay can help you out!
Check out our use case page for more detailed information on how to use Relay for responding to app store reviews, or get started with the Relay template directly!
