Panel:Customer Support for Your App's Success: How Customer Support Teams Drive App Metrics & Profit

all right next up we have a panel um this is a panel uh i'd like to welcome daniel nicolescu dana pavel and richard banchik benich on a panel on customer support for your app success um how customer support teams can drive app metrics and profit so welcome aboard thank you thanks for having us and again like like just a reminder to the audience just like everyone's been doing such a great job this entire track has dropped questions into the q a during the panel so thank you it's all yours well well to get started i'm going to share some slides i'll be the moderator for today's session and we also have some questions between us basically well hello everyone and welcome my name is daniel uh and i'll be the moderator for today's session

it's going to be about how customer support teams drive app metrics and profit today's presentation is actually a joint effort between app follow and our partners and friends from 10 square games and pixel federation get started let's know a little bit more about the panelists starting with myself so i'm a senior customer success manager at follow my role basically is to help customers use the platform and you know reap the benefits from using affollo i've worked in sales and customer success previously helped grow the ar of multiple companies and also helped you know change the company culture in one of my previous experiences when it came to software security i'm joined from the nav followed from the apple side by donna who's my colleague she's also a senior customer success manager with five years of experience in the iit industry especially with gaming and sas companies donna is very passionate about customer success uh she looks for the latest trends and

topics and she embeds that kind of knowledge and helps improve processes wherever she works then we have our partners uh greg from 10 square games whose role is as a head of communication customer care so greg has been with 10 square games for over eight years now he built basically the customer service department and uh he also oversees gaming service operations like vip support localization social media and outsourcing and last but not least we have richard uh oh sorry about that we have richard from pixel federation who is a senior community manager uh he's been working with the company for over five years and solely with the uh gaming industry moving on i've been talking about app follow-up for those of you who don't know what or who app follow is we're basically an app management platform uh we really take pride of being an all-in-one

solution uh and for starters uh we when we fit multiple purposes and one would be for instance ad monitoring uh this means that through at follow you can track ratings review ratings downloads in-app purchases uh you can do that very via our various dashboards and reporting mechanisms then very importantly we have a review processing module which basically implies analyzing reviews uh gaining insights from those but very importantly responding to user feedback you can respond to user feedback either via app follow directly or through help desk systems that integrate very easily with our platform last but not least we also have a an aso module which is uh relevant for marketing uh aso stands for app store optimization and it revolves around keywords so basically uh helping the visibility of your app increase the visibility of your app and the conversion rate our

platform integrates with multiple stores app stores so the app store google play amazon and others uh follow is trusted by over 70 000 companies worldwide and you can see a few of the logos right here on screen of gaming companies especially and as a company right now we're a little over 80 employees spread across over 10 countries and we're in the process of hiring more and more people uh in various regions just to add that kind of multicultural flavor to our business now for today's session we'll be looking at the review processing section which means you know analyzing reviews responding to those and gaining those metrics uh but at the end of the day you know you get your reviews you see them either in the apps or google play where you see them in athol why would you respond to those why would you waste your time in answering the user feedback well it's not only us at follow who believe and the benefit of doing this but it's also apple for instance who uh

say that you know asking for ratings and in-app prompts responding the reviews ultimately will lead to uh improving the visibility of the app increasing the number of downloads and helping bring that building that connection with the community which is very important the remain competitor google believes the same thing so back in 2019 they estimated that roughly 100 000 reviews get a response from developers in the google play console daily and people that update the review do that in average by increasing the rating by plus 0.7 which is a staggering number now this all sounds fine and dandy right you respond to reviews but how do you do that or how do you tackle the different scenarios because people tend to complain come complain about different things so let's take one of the most common examples is responding to a negative review we consider negative reviews to be between one and three stars some other people consider negative reviews between to be between one and

two stars the idea is to respond to these effectively effectively means acknowledging the user's problem uh giving them guidance if you can on the spot by responding to the review if not you can always redirect them to a generic email address which is handled by the support team that way you can you know dig a little bit deeper into the root cause of the problem uh but also you can get those contact details of the users which is important for certain customers who want to build this kind like customer journeys and also if it's a fix or a bug that can be addressed in a future update never hesitate to relay that information back to the customer into the user and tell them look we're gonna address this we know your problem we're gonna address it in the future of the update the kind of answers usually are appreciated by users and they ultimately will come back and improve the rating of the review over bigger sample the more reviews get an improved rating ultimately

over bigger batches of reviews these will impact the overall rating of the app and this goes without saying as a key metric we know that higher ranked higher of apps with higher ratings have a bigger chance of getting higher up in the rankings if you hit that 4.0 for instance you can you can get featured so this will hence bring a lot of downloads for apps new users subscriptions in-app purchases money what not we all basically do this on a day-to-day basis uh whether we're buying a car a kitchen appliance we're booking a hotel even now during covet times we're still looking at review uh reviews ratings before we actually make a decision now people that don't know how to tackle these kind of situations how to respond to reviews optimally we're in the process of launching a review management academy which is free of charge available for everybody and donna will be talking about this in a little more detail sure

thank you daniel and hi everyone really excited to be on this panel um yeah i mean managing reviews replying to reviews is not an easy job um and uh we got you covered with the review management academy um is going to be launched very soon and what is going to be in a nutshell is a collection of articles on how to work with app ratings and reviews um our main goal with this project is to arm the teams responsible for reviews with the necessary knowledge to manage them successfully and efficiently so um the platform targets primarily support teams and and community teams who besides working with tickets or other social media feedback um on a regular basis they also have to reply to app reviews from google play app store or other sources we'll be sharing best practices on for how to set up kpis around this work

and how to measure them effectively but also very importantly how to automate replying to reviews with the goal of saving time and financial resources of course we know that support teams and community management teams are not the only ones monitoring reviews reading reviews and working with them so um some of the articles will be targeted to product managers for example and marketing managers who will find knowledge around uh why it's important to work with ratings and reviews in the first place but also what performance metrics they affect and just in general what insights they can extract from them so yeah definitely a lot of exciting content coming up um it's going to be launched very very soon so do stick around for um for updates on linkedin or other social media app followers thank you thank you donna

and now the share their stories and the actual metrics that they they've uh you know they've had by replying to reviews by processing reviews we have greg from 10 square games and thank you daniel um a pleasure being here maybe first of all please allow me to to to tell you a little about our company 10 square games is one of the biggest free-to-play and development studios in poland we mainly specialize in outdoor simulations simulator games one of our most popular titles is fishing clash which ranked like top 40 some time ago on on google play so quite quite high um we have almost above now 400 employees um in four studios in poland berlin and romania and like from three years we are on the worst of stock exchange and from that time we are like

growing rapidly so please allow me to share you our case regarding and the reviews because it was like quite an adventure for us so our like the main thing we wanted to solve was to fully optimize the online reviews management for our products we started with hunting clash one of our games which is a hunting simulator and it had its global launch last year and the problems we were facing were as follows like we wanted to we needed like to assign additional agents in order to handle the reviews because like there were they were arriving constantly in case of issues they were peaking so we need to throw more and more resources at it the problem was that also there was a pull effectiveness in like rating conversions like we actually didn't saw any difference between automated reviews and custom reviews

that were custom reviews their responses from the agents like there were no difference in in that and also we had some localizational issues um some time ago we only supported two languages and in order for reviews to be most effective it required time and extra resources to provide translations and this like stretch the response time longer and longer so the actions we took thanks to upfollow it was like we fully automated the responses and localized them for all of our almost for all of our languages that we supported in within the game it actually reduced costs because it takes you only have a single person who is assigned to that task and the setup is easy all you need to do is to prepare some templates some custom templates are required for specific problems specific issues and it requires limited moderation as our products are constantly being

updated from time to time we also need to update our templates but this takes actually less time and less man hours than we would do the same with dedicated agents to that to that process and now maybe some more on the benefits first of all like the impact of reviews for up performance and possible featurings you need to be aware like in our case and precisely that users think of reviews as another way to communicate with your support team as another channel that you will actually try to help them there and in case of issues problems there can be a spike of negative reviews we experience it from time to time and like in support people also players also like they require they expect the fastest answers possible so thanks to the automations

you can give them like instantaneous responses which is first of all like it actually rises the chance that they will change their response from negative to a positive one uh second of all like most reviews work they are connected to the user's emails and usually when the user once posts a response there is a very low chance he will actually see the notification that you responded and like will take any action whatsoever so this actually helps and as for the possible featurings of course the quality of the response is also important as you try to build you know a community with your player base and like build your image as a company but you need to be aware that it is more important to actually give a response whatsoever than like give even an accurate one but i i don't encourage that like stores don't check the comments like by themselves uh each and every one they only check if there was a percent

of how big is the percentages of the responses and thanks to automations you can actually respond to each and every review you get as for adding new products for lg score management and user feedback and this is i don't know if this is unique for us but we experience it several times in the fastest way to get the feedback from players and the fastest way to get early feedback and feedback what any feedback is via the reviews um and if you funnel the users if you like inform them it's great that you talked with us it's great that you written about our product but how about visit our faq basis our support channels and we will help you there in faster in and in a better way and for new products it's also important to get the feedback of course to the product team so they can react accordingly but also it's a i would say a learning process for them

for the player base and like the actual like benefit that we received from from this from this case study was like we improved our review score by 0.71 points for hunting clash it of course it was only for for reviews but nevertheless it's still uh quite a significant number and you need to be aware that the higher your score is the bigger the chance for of course your app being noticed and the bigger chance for for possible featurings also this last but not least of course the follow interface is very user friendly which is important as it also limits the time you need to spend on managing it and it's far more intuitive than most panels uh for for the main platforms you can get okay thank

you for for listening that's all from my side and over to richard thanks for passing this over to richard to share his story for uh from the pixel federation perspective so thank you for the invitation daniel and dana and thank you for uh your presentation greg we have a very similar experience at pixel federation uh like great greg has described and first of all i would like to take the time to present uh our company so you can have a better uh feeling for what we were dealing with during our issues and uh so our company is rooted in the capital slovakia in bratislava and was founded by four game enthusiasts in 2007 and thus comes our motto also from players to players so we are currently also expanding our

offices to czech republic to brno and even though our company is still growing we are still priding ourselves on developing our games and publishing for our community based games and we are very active and try to listen to our communities at every step of our development process while working on our games so if a player chooses to play one of our games they can either encounter some of our mythical beings in my heart's favorite diggies adventure or build a regular empire in train station 2 or manage a fleet with seaport or many more adventures within our games

and we are a little bit smaller company than uh my colleague greg here but we have 20 150 uh great people uh and uh professionals that are working for our firm so we have started out uh as a facebook game development company and we're used to having our player base located also on facebook and in all of the facebook groups connected with uh our games and since we've moved on to a mobile uh publisher and a mobile game company who we have encountered our games and our communities moving on to the app store review sections also using these as a communication

channel and thus shifted also or shifted our focus on working with the reviews themselves so as a smaller team of 15 community managers uh dealing with the daily ticket load and also tending to our communities this additional task uh of uh as you can see five to ten k reviews a month has uh been uh a challenge for us and we were looking into uh being more effective and from a managerial standpoint uh using our manpower resources even more effective but also staying true to our motto like i said from players to players tending to the issues of all of our players and wanted to give all of them replies so as you can

as you as you can imagine we had a lot of prolonged review replies in in some of the cases and uh since some of the issues could have been solved in an instant matter uh some of the players may have been discouraged uh by let's say the early starts of a game where they perhaps didn't understand the game mechanic or have been simply encountered a short-term bug which could have been explained in a very short answer or a short manner so we thought we were losing some of our audience members in this way and that's why we have been in contact with daniel and his team and we're looking into the automation process itself so um

what we have achieved during our half year uh work together with the team at appfolo was that we were able to automate the common issues uh that were located in the reviews themselves and uh currently we are automating only 61 of all the reviews so not as full as greg was describing but since we are present in three app stores we can now [Applause] we can now tend to all of the reviews via the integration feature in our help desk so that means we are able to see the whole scale of the whole scope of all of the user feedback in in one place also from a material standpoint we are able to track the workload that would be placed

on each of our colleagues each of our community managers and also apply some of the kpis that we are able to do within the ticketing tasks of our colleagues and uh yeah during during uh the analysis of the reviews which has been again much easier uh given that we can find them under under one roof uh was that we were able to detect that a lot of players have been submitting positive reviews which we discovered thanks to the the features that [Applause] have pointed this out to us and we could uh we were receiving a lot of positive reviews in text but they were in fact uh only one to three stars reviews so uh given that

we could identify these uh we have also addressed these with our players and have found that they they have indeed changed their reviews in many of the cases um also what also greg has uh pointed out that uh since we are developing a lot of new games the uh day day one following of all of the uh reviews on our apps is of vital importance and have found that a lot of players tend to use the platform of uh sending us feedback via the reviews more often than they do via the tickets and thus we were able to react more swiftly to any issues that they were having not necessarily on a technical level but maybe perhaps understanding some of the game features

and which we were then able to address and within the starts of each app this could majorly affect the overall app rating and the visibility of a app and perhaps even [Music] even even a show in the early early development of the game so um when when we see one of our use cases we have looked into the dashboards of the tool and could see that uh in the reviews updated as a result of a reply they there have been uh an increase of the star ratings the this this slide which daniel is showing is a specific case uh where we have an increase of

1.6 star or the rating is increased by 1.6 in the uh replies that have been updated um thanks to our our replies uh the reviews have been updated thanks thanks to our replies uh in this case we uh we have tackled with the rating uh going lower than four stars and thus the app wasn't eligible for a feature and thanks to the uh decline uh thanks to the uh app which has uh which has pointed out the decline of the stars we were actually able to to find out that we had the rating prompt in our game uh wasn't functioning at the time so our community managers did a splendid job and uh covered this lack of this feature with their hard work so what i would

like to end with is our two point of views perhaps uh others than the business side of the the uh solving the reviews is that uh the section or the the panel that a customer player sees the first time is the profile of the game on the app store and having seen that all of the reviews of our players are being attended to gives positive encouragement and also the overall rating is uh [Applause] is affected by by the replies of the uh reviews and of course we would like to honor the hard work of our game designers and all of our

colleagues with uh having uh objective rating for our app uh so that they their work is acknowledged in the app store so this this would be my takeaway and i give the word back to daniel and thank you for listening thank you richard for your input uh now i do have a couple of questions uh the first one is actually for greg and you what are the things that you have to take into consideration maybe uh you know the full spectrum when it comes to responding to reviews from your experience richard yes so um first of all when we didn't have uh perhaps the automation feature uh or we didn't uh haven't thought about the automation feature yet we had to make a tough choice of uh using our time more effectively

and have only attended to uh to the negative reviews to have a full impact on our overall rating but uh since we wanted to attend to all of our players needs we we chose the automation route so so this was one of one of one of our biggest challenges so far and if i may add currently we are uh fighting with uh with let's say um the thought of how how much we would want to automate the process and which part of the of the replying we would like to keep manually and have still a personal touch at the end of the day perfect thank you have you considered for instance looking at what competitors do have you tried that angle

i i maybe could answer that then yes we are trying to monitor our competitors um especially like if we see a dip in the amount of negative reviews we can then backtrack and check if they had any updates like how maybe that's an information for us how the features could be performing um this and this can also be in use for us and overall like see how the competition is doing um as an entire group like for specific genres like for sports games for instance so this is also useful and i highly recommend that perfect sounds good last but not least i have a question for donna uh being that you're a csm for so many customers having a large portfolio what are the latest market trends when it comes to working with reviews sure um so i think particularly for the games

industry right there's definitely more and more games being created i think as long as investors are looking are on the lookout for the next interesting project new titles will continue to appear as a result of that what we see is that app developers are spending more and more on user acquisition at the same time what i noticed is there's a lot of acquisitions and mergers going on especially with the bigger studios which is a dynamic um so typical of the um of the games industry not just for mobile games but also for you know the rest of the industry um so i think this definitely these factors definitely lead to an overload for the support teams who have to handle the communication with an increasing number of users in both tickets and across media platforms and and

[Music] google google play app store etc um so i think um from this perspective automation will definitely play a key role for these teams because they will most likely be prompted to manage the workload without spending too much if that makes sense perfect for now for presentation pretty much that wraps it up we're open for questions now if we have any well i guess that wraps it up for our side uh you can always reach out to us either to our the email address that you see here on screen from our support team but also reach out to us whenever we can create a discord or anything we're open to questions and suggestions uh all of us actually can give their advice from our experiences whether from an affordable perspective or from a

gaming company perspective when it comes to working with reviews so i guess thanks for listening yes thanks thank you thank you thanks for listening thank you have a great rest of the day [Music] bye