Aviasales is the largest airfare search engine in Russia and CIS. It helps to find cheap flights and compare deals on airline tickets. The company seeks to acquire and retain customers in one of the most competitive categories of all — Travel.

Challenge

As a part of its conversion rate optimization strategy in the App Store, the team implemented an in-app rating request. As a result, they started to get thousands of ratings and reviews – far more than they had expected. Seeing the great average rating and positive reviews, potential users would be more likely to download the app.

As it became easier to leave feedback, the number of negative reviews increased slightly. Leaving this feedback unanswered could easily turn it into 1-star reviews, and decrease the average app rating. Working with the updated positive reviews is crucial as well — if a user updated his review with the lower rating, that means it’s something wrong in the app. So, Aviasales needed a solution to work with the increased amount of user feedback and track all the reviews, including updated ones.

Solution

Thanks to the AppFollow App Review Monitor Tool, Aviasales quickly came up with a 3-step strategy to manage customer feedback and maintain a high average rating:

1. Monitoring. The team integrated AppFollow into their Slack, so that all reviews were funneled into a special channel. They use AppFollow’s tagging system to divide all reviews into groups. For example, the reviews with a “bug” tag go to the QA team, and the ones with a “request” tag to the dev team to realise them in future releases.

2. Replying to reviews. Aviasales used the Usedesk platform as their preliminary help desk for the website, so they integrated AppFollow to cover all feedback in one place. Notifications about review updates appear as their regular tickets — so the team never misses any of the changes.

3. Reporting offensive and spam reviews. Spam reviews affect your conversion rate in the most negative way. Aviasales “cleans up the mess” twice a month. They report all reviews that look like ads, spam, and with strong language, and 80% of them are usually deleted afterward.

Results

Aviasales used this strategy for 8 months and noticed a huge difference:

• The average rate of 4.8 remained the same for almost a year, despite the generally decreasing rating trend in the Travel category.
• Every featured review and over 50% of overall reviews have a reply.
• 60% of users changed their reviews from negative to positive after the developer’s fast reaction.
• The team noticed that replying to reviews had a positive impact on the app downloads in the long run.