Rating-drop alerts: catch a bad release in an hour
Your lifetime average rating is a comforting number and a terrible alarm. By the time a bad release drags a 4.6 down to a 4.4, thousands of ratings have already been cast and the damage is done. The signal you actually need — something changed, recently, for the worse — is buried under years of history.
Rating-drop alerts are built to surface that signal early.
Watch the recent window, not the lifetime average
Instead of your all-time average, alerts watch a rolling window of recent ratings. A ship goes out on Tuesday, the new build has a crash on a popular device, and the reviews coming in right now start averaging 2.8 — even while your lifetime number still reads 4.5.
You set a threshold per channel. When the recent average slips below it, Reviewcast posts an alert to that channel with the numbers and a link to the reviews driving it. No dashboard-watching required; the alert comes to you.
Route the reviews that matter with keyword rules
Alerts tell you that something is wrong. Keyword rules help you see what — as it happens.
Set a rule and reviews matching it get routed to the channel you choose. A few ways teams use them:
- Send anything mentioning "crash," "refund," or "charged" straight to a support channel.
- Route reviews naming a specific feature to the squad that owns it.
- Keep a firehose channel for everything, and a filtered channel for only the reviews that need a human today.
Both alerts and keyword rules are configured per channel, so different teams can watch for different things without stepping on each other.
Why an hour matters
Store reviews have a short half-life. A reviewer who hits a bug is most reachable in the first day — while they still remember what happened and still have the app installed. Catching a bad release within an hour instead of a week is the difference between a reply that saves the relationship and a post-mortem that just records the loss.
That's the whole point of the feature: shorten the gap between something broke and someone knows.