How Toca Boca increased Reply Rate by 109% and added 26.7K Stars
From struggling with scale to mastering automation
Toca Boca is a mobile gaming studio creating digital play spaces for kids. With over 60 million + monthly active users in their flagship product Toca Boca World, they've built one of the leading kids' gaming experiences. Winner of App Store's App of the Year in 2021, Toca Boca has over 1 billion downloads and a strong community across social media.
Challenges
- 75,000 monthly reviews across global audience
- Negative reply effect of -0.3 stars with manual responses
- Challenging technical issues
- Manual review management couldn't scale
- Kids and tweens expect genuine communication
- Native app store tools lack granular data and automation
- Rising percentage of negative reviews (21% to 25%)
Numbers reached with AppFollow
+0.45⭐
Positive reply effect improvement across 2024
498%
increase in total reviews replied to YoY
109%
Increase in reply rate
26.7K
stars added to ratings after a review reply
AppFollow tools used
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Auto-tags and semantic tagging
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Reply kit with templates
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AI summaries
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Automation with approval mode
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Integration with support systems
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Performance tracking and analytics
What they achieved
Toca Boca started 2025 with 36.77% reply rate and negative 0.3 reply effect. The Studio committed to a complete rebuild in three phases. Final results were 71.76% reply rate with +0.15 reply effect.
The breakthrough came when they stopped requiring high confidence before automating. Their universal 1-star automation replied to 13,800 reviews with +1.71 reply effect. Players just needed acknowledgement and a path to help.
"We've seen a 109% increase in reply rate and +.45 increase in reply effect. 498% increase in total reviews replied to year over year. 26.7K stars added to ratings after a review reply in H2. Keyword and sentiment tracking gives clarity to the noise, which unlocks automation."
Jonny Hair, Senior Customer Experience Manager
Toca Boca proved agents reviewing automation performance beats agents typing manual replies. Template folders with AI rephrasing helped test copy to prevent robotic responses while maintaining their strict tone of voice guidelines. Integration with support systems meant complex issues got routed properly.
By the end of 2025, they moved App Store from 3.9 to 4.1 stars and Google Play from 4.2 to 4.3 stars. The team handles massive volume without proportional headcount growth.
Looking to the future
Toca Boca is exploring the feasibility of AI-generated replies as the next step. They've built strong foundations with tagging, templates, and quality assurance processes. AI could handle more edge cases while maintaining quality standards.
They're also building out knowledge base integration. When you direct players to help resources at massive scale, those resources need to work properly. The approach of automation handling volume while humans focus on quality assurance and iteration gives room to keep growing.
