A Provider of Customer Reviews Cuts Response Times by 2x

Description

A marketing software company turned to Altoros to optimize its rating management platform, extend functionality, improve maintenance, and enable visualization of user preferences.

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The company migrated its customer review management platform to a React.js-based stack without downtime, improving maintenance and reducing response time by 2x.
• Now, the customer is able to release new features every 2–3 weeks.
• Thanks to the integration with Google My Business, the organization facilitated the creation and verification of business accounts on the search engine. This helps to reach out to a larger local audience.
• With a new visualization dashboard, it became possible to analyze ratings gathered from 27 sources across 72 metrics updated in real time.

The customer

Based in Germany, the company is a provider of a platform that enables businesses to gather customer reviews and ratings from multiple sources, manage them, and interact with the audience. Founded in 2016, the organization serves retail, manufacturing, information technology, and other industries.

The need

The customer’s review management platform was built on top of the very first version of Angular and never got updated. As the user base grew, it became necessary to introduce new features and improve the existing ones. However, an outdated technology stack significantly complicated maintenance and disrupted user experience.

Collaborating with Altoros, the company wanted to migrate to a modern technology stack, improving maintenance and implementing new functionality.

The challenges

• It was important to conduct migration without downtime.
• Each time a user searched across reviews or ratings, the page would reload. This generated a lot of cache and, consequently, had a negative impact on performance.
• The platform had to gather user preferences from 27 sources and analyze them across dozens of dynamic metrics. All this data had to be visualized in charts, configurable by metric type and responsive to real-time changes.

The solution

Stage 1. After analyzing the customer requirements, engineers at Altoros conducted a comparative research of front-end technologies that would address existing business needs. As a result, React.js was chosen because of its comprehensive tooling, as well as ease of upgrades, customization, and support. Then, our developers outlined a roadmap for migration without downtime. Thanks to a virtual DOM, React.js also favors rapid development, so our team managed to deliver new features every 2–3 weeks.

Stage 2. By utilizing the SWR library for data fetching, engineers at Altoros enabled the system to automatically and uninterruptedly update information during search without reloading the page. This helped to reduce response time by 2x.

Stage 3. Our team developed a dashboard that builds comprehensive charts, visualizing data gathered from 27 sources across 72 metrics. By implementing Highcharts, developers at Altoros enabled users to easily configure and resize the graphs in a few clicks. With React DnD, our engineers built the drag-and-drop interface.

Stage 4. Additionally, the team integrated the review count module with Google My Business, enabling to create review templates and filter testimonials by a company location.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the company migrated its review management platform to a modernized stack without downtime. This helped to improve maintenance, reduce response time by 2x, and seamlessly introduce new functionality every 2–3 weeks. By integrating the system’s review count module with Google My Business, the organization enabled its customers to easily create and verify accounts on the search engine. This contributed to placing businesses on Google Maps and making them visible to a larger local audience during search.