‘Over 90 per cent of customers say they look up reviews before deciding to make a purchase’

Chris Deane, co-founder of customer insights platform Baboost, believes in making consumer reviews work for their living. He says companies should be trying to increase their volume of customer reviews and once the reviews have been captured they should be leveraged for competitive advantage. In short, more reviews create more visibility and this can push businesses higher up the pecking order in internet searches without paying for the privilege.

“Reviews are a really important tool because over 90 per cent of customers say they look up reviews before deciding to make a purchase. Baboost can help companies grow and manage these customer reviews in an easy to use and cost-effective way,” Deane says.

Baboost was founded by Deane, who is a marketing graduate; Phil O’Neill, who has a background in information systems and analytics; and full stack developer Shail Savaliya. The business was launched in early July following a pivot.

“Initially, we were looking at going the route of a referrals platform. However, we discovered that there were very particular challenges involved in relation to engagement and incentivisation with referrals and the more we talked to businesses, the more we realised that customer reviews and feedback were actually a far more valuable commodity if we could go in that direction instead,” Deane says.

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Baboost is specifically aimed at businesses on tight budgets that need a review system that works with their existing technology without the expense of configuration or set-up costs. “With Baboost it’s possible for a client to get started in minutes,” Deane says. “Our system integrates seamlessly with any website and has an AI algorithm that automatically requests feedback and/or reviews directly from customers at certain stages based on specific data points.

“With Baboost, companies can connect to the most popular review sites and collect, monitor, manage, and respond to their customer reviews all from one platform so it’s very time effective. Baboost connects to any ecommerce store in minutes and it also supports a variety of other review collection capabilities, for online and offline business, including bulk upload and QR code. With Baboost a client can also market their customer reviews by embedding our review widget and sharing their customers’ stories as social proof.”

Baboost’s revenue model is software as a service with subscriptions starting from €23 a month and the company is targeting all industry sectors with its solution. To date, its clients have come from tech, retail, hospitality, real estate and ecommerce. “We’re very much focused on businesses that want to improve the customer experience and ultimately increase the quality and volume of business reviews on popular review sites,” Deane says. “The type of client that our system will work really well for is someone who is proactive in their business, who cares about what their customers have to say and responds quickly to them.”

Reviews can be the life blood of a business but they work best when there is a lot of them. “Companies need to take an active role in review generation because when it comes to boosting a brand, it’s all about SEO [search engine optimisation] and driving more traffic to the company’s site,” Deane says. “If a business has more positive customer reviews then it’s more likely it will appear in an organic Google search than a business that only has a few.”

Baboost was started on a bootstrapped budget of about €30,000 in founder equity and €15,000 in support from Enterprise Ireland as part of its new frontiers entrepreneurs’ programme. On top of this there was the large amount of time the founders spent developing the system. Asked to put a value on what that might have cost if the company had been paying an outside contractor to make it all happen, Deane estimates the cost at more than €100,000.