Introduction
The leadership team of Belgium’s governing football federation, the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA), aspired to create a premier-quality app to connect the entire Belgian football community. The official RBFA app would not only open up a world of stats and scores for users to follow, but also personalize the experience for the federation’s dedicated fans.
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RBFA’s Kim Van Wynendaele, Digital Project Manager, and Koen Landsheere, IT Manager, share how their mobile teams leveraged Instabug as a key player to reach their app performance quality goals.
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Objective
As it prepared to debut an all-new app, the RBFA engineering team needed to ensure that the user experience would live up to fans’ expectations. Landsheere noted that improving bug reporting and in-app user experience and providing a centralized administrative view for the mobile team were essential to making the new platform as fan-friendly as possible.
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Landsheere was familiar with its capabilities and knew it would be a critical asset for the new app's debut. Instabug had the ability to support expanded interactive features RBFA had planned, such as the ability to raise tickets in-app.
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“[We needed] a centralized administration point on our side where all tickets from all platforms for iOS and Android are arriving. But the dashboard is important on the administrative side, too, because we can define rules to generate automatic replies to users,” said Landsheere.
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Challenge
Connecting the Belgian football teams with their fans through RBFA’s app needed to be a seamless experience. The development team needed as much information as possible about the app’s performance to quickly assess and solve any issues that might come into play.
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The team was already receiving tickets through email, but needed a faster, more streamlined way to triage issues by urgency and assign them to the appropriate teams. RBFA sought a solution that would provide developers with as much detail as possible to ensure quick resolution. “We needed to see how the app is performing on Android or iOS, and have very detailed information about a bug so our developers instantly have enough information to debug a problem,” said Landsheere.
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The RBFA mobile team needed an attack plan focused on fast and effective bug reporting in both pre-production and production environments to ensure a smooth user experience. “[We needed] information about the number of tickets entering and the lead time before a ticket received a response,” said Landsheere.
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Solution
Because RBFA was already using Jira and Zendesk, it was easy to incorporate Instabug into their workflows using Instabug’s Jira and Zendesk integration. That move allowed the team to distinguish reported bugs and suggested improvements from customer service requests, and forward them to the appropriate tool. Bug reports go to Jira and customer support tickets go to Zendesk. Van Wynendaele explained that when a customer submits a ticket, a mobile team member reviews the reported bug and sends it to the appropriate developer via the Jira integration. With Instabug, RBFA’s teams use tags to identify various issues for consistency on the customer report side; this process automatically notifies the dev team as well.
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With more automated processes, developers save time when assigning issues and handling in-app customer feedback responses. “Once the user reports a bug, it triggers our plan for customer support,” said Van Wynendaele. “There's a process depending on whether it's a technical bug that has or has not been reported yet. The developers follow up on those bugs, and it also provides the user with feedback about what's going on with their customer service request.”
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For example, if the app was having login issues, all issues related to login issues are grouped on the same tag. Grouping the issues enables the team to respond to all users who reported that issue at once, taking advantage of a systematic approach to customer support.
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Van Wynendaele continued, “Instabug makes it easier for the tech teams to find the source of the problem thanks to the many details included in the reported tickets. By grouping tickets together, you can discover trends.”
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Results
RBFA gets a clear view of those trends, reports, and overall app performance through the app dashboard, which centralizes all of the app’s performance metrics. Landsheere emphasized the impact of comprehensive reports and visibility of app performance on the dashboard: “With Instabug, we see right away if something is wrong on any platform after a release and how many tickets are raised on any issue so our development team can act quickly.”
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The app’s users began responding to consistent improvements of in-app features with higher ratings in the app stores. Moreover, the support team can now respond directly to customer reviews and issues, providing real-time feedback and solutions that further improve the user experience.
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That positive feedback and user experience focus extends from the support team to the development team as they continue to work together to reach app performance goals. As the development team has integrated more Instabug capabilities, Van Wynendaele has noticed cross-functional improvement. “It has already facilitated and greatly improved how the support team works together with the development team.”
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Just as cooperation on the field can lead the Red Devils and Red Flames to victory, better team communication is proving a key factor in reaching the app’s performance goals. “The impact is in working together across those different teams, making sure there's a follow up, and if things go bad that we have immediate action where needed,” said van Wynendaele.
Landsheere continued, “It's improved our processes and the way we collaborate,” noting the speed with which the developers receive information and can then move on to finding a solution.
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As the RBFA audience continues to evolve, welcoming and reacting to new players and changing strategies, the RBFA app is following suit. The mobile development team is adopting  new strategies and tools, including Instabug, to create a better UX driven by integrated and detailed user feedback. Get the full experience, exclusive content, and all the results and rankings of Belgian football competitions via the RBFA app—download from the App Store here or the Google play store here.
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