Company: BOON
Founder(s): Dylan Grey and Mike Oakley
Website: https://www.yourboon.co/
Description: Helping to enhance online experiences via state-of-the-art personalisation and giving consumers complete control over their data.
Since late 2019, BOON’s technology has allowed retailers to help their customers find the best products for their unique situation, personality and desires. Unlike conventional recommendation engines, BOON does not track users behind-the-scenes. Instead, psychologists design engaging, fun and insightful questions to establish each shopper’s likes, dislikes and personality. Their proprietary AI recommendation engine picks out the best recommendations for the shopper or gift-recipient and learns from their feedback, improving recommendations for each subsequent user.
Users remain completely anonymous throughout the experience and are given complete control of their data through the questions they’re asked. Consumers love the experience with 96% completing all the questions once they start (with some branches asking up to 12 questions), and personal recommendations delivering up to 85% increase in conversion rate and 35% increase in average basket size.
BOON has found that conventional search and product listings are overwhelming and dull for users who are often looking for quick and fun help when shopping online. Whilst this is obviously true for gifting, it is also increasingly the case when shopping for oneself, particularly with in-person experiences being more of a rarity.
Additionally, retailers are struggling to find simple and accurate insights into their customer base; “Who are users buying for?”, “What are their demographics?”, “Are they open to new ideas?”, “What is their budget?”. BOON aggregates anonymous question responses and feedback to provide retailers with these insights from zero-party data.
Whilst the pandemic has caused lots of risk-aversion in retailers, BOON is excited to see increasing interest in privacy-focused personalisation tools as well as ongoing success with clients across retail sectors. With more regulations and restrictions on third-party cookies being introduced in major web browsers, privacy is becoming more of a concern for consumers and an important issue for personalisation technology providers to address.
This year, BOON is focusing on an increased push to build their client base and the release of a self-service platform to help the technology benefit retailers of all sizes and sectors.
Find an explainer video and a demo at www.boonspotlight.com
