Ilkley to host the launch of feedback enterprise

Mr Jones and Mr Bennett, who met at the University of Sheffield in 2002 and formerly worked in IT recruitment and landscape architecture, have so far funded the start-up themselves, but they hope to seek investment at a later date.

Last year, inspired by a visit to a Marks & Spencer café, Mr Bennett realised that there should be an easier way for people to give feedback to the businesses whose services they use, and he started developing this idea with Mr Jones.

“Yapback’s mission is to become the ‘go-to’ place for leaving and responding to feedback,” said Mr Jones. “We want to provide a feedback forum that brings together customers and businesses and encourages open communication. Using customer feedback to guide service improvement is how we want to grow Yapback, and how we want Yapback to help other businesses.”

He added: “We’ve chosen Ilkley to host our first trial as we wanted to start in a small but bustling town with a reputation for thriving local and independent businesses, which is who we think could benefit the most from the customer engagement and exposure that Yapback encourages.”

Yapback will have a presence in Ilkley for a week starting on August 14, and will be awarding prizes to the top ‘Yappers’ and businesses of the week.

The firm said the Yapback website allows users to search for and ‘Yap’ about any business, using an autocomplete search to make finding the right business easy, and a quick form to record the details of the feedback.

The ‘Yap’ is posted into the ‘YapStreams’ – similar to a Twitter feed – of both the user and business involved, and Yapback approaches the business to inform them of the feedback, inviting them to respond, as well as sharing the ‘Yap’ through social media.

Yapback launched its website in January, and then the mobile web app in May. The iOS app was released last month, with an Android app in the pipeline. Yapback featured at Venturefest Yorkshire this year, a science and technology expo in York, and was a finalist in the investment competition.