Optus is a telecommunications company headquartered in Australia. Optus offers applications and solutions that enable its customers to access music content, watch TV shows, and much more. It also provides its customers with tools and solutions to track and pay their mobile bills, as well as other support services.

Challenge

The Optus’ Digital Service tribe has been using AppFollow since the beginning of 2020. Apart from the main use case of responding to mobile app reviews, the Digital Service tribe had a few challenges they needed to overcome when working with app reviews.

• Prioritization. With large volumes of incoming reviews, Optus had to spend time going through feedback and categorizing it by topic manually. . The whole process was pretty slow, and there was only enough time to answer some reviews.
• Release insights. When the team launched new features, it was difficult to monitor key feedback and identify issues that should be quickly resolved. Digital Service tribe had to read each review carefully and then estimate the scale of an issue at a glance.
• Categorization and correct routing. Individual squads are responsible for particular types of issues. Optus had to manually categorize reviews to identify which squad is responsible for the particular case - a very painstaking process that would take 8-10 hours per month. This slowed down the process of helping users and responding to reviews.

Solution

By setting up the auto-tags, the Optus team was able to resolve all aforementioned challenges. Now, AppFollow goes through the reviews automatically and assigns tags according to the rules set up by the team. The rules are focused on the specific text that a review can contain, the length of the review, and the review rating. With this setup, the majority of reviews are automatically and accurately tagged.

Result

Optus Digital Service tribe no longer needs to manually go through reviews and spend time collecting data for prioritizing the backlog. The Auto-tags feature tags reviews automatically.

Getting insights from new releases is now a much easier task. With the data captured using Auto-tags, Optus recently identified a significant issue that was causing a blank screen to show for a number of users. This significant problem presented itself in a spike of “error” auto-tag reviews. The team was able to identify this issue in close to real-time and implement a fix within 24 hours.

Now that individual squads control the particular review tags with ease, Optus has been able to increase the percentage of customers the team responds to from 60% to over 90% - as well as the timeliness of the replies.