Optimising the Buyer’s Journey with Custom Objects and Dynamic Content in HubSpot

Internet Service Provider (ISP) Rebel Internet (“Rebel”) is disrupting the UK broadband market. In addition to providing the latest Wi-Fi hardware and software to eliminate dead spots, dropouts, and buffering, Rebel offers zero-contract periods and 24/7 customer service in a bid to counter the onerous terms and unfair price increases of existing providers. The company also launched the UK’s only WiFi as a Service (WaaS) solution.

Rebel came to Salted Stone in Q4 of 2022 with three big asks:

• Update their existing Order Journey to include a discovery component that would match customers with the right broadband and/or WiFi product for their needs. This was driven by a desire to simplify the buying process and enable more effective, personalised abandoned cart follow up. 
• Establish a way to gather insights on their buyer’s journey, including the discovery and ordering processes, in order to improve the experience for potential customers and generate additional revenue via tailored up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. 
• Build a new website that showcased their new branding.

The challenge

Rebel’s HubSpot instance was not optimised or connected to their order journey in a way that enabled reporting on the complete buyer’s journey. Data was split across deals and contacts in inconsistent and complex ways, making it difficult to report on actual customer numbers, and almost impossible to identify up-sells, cross-sells or churn. This limited their ability to leverage reporting insights and restricted their ability to create meaningful, data-driven follow-ups to customers as part of their ongoing service. 

“We needed to deliver an intuitive and seamless customer experience in the “learn” and “buy” journeys that matched the brilliant way our customers experience our products and service. Unfortunately, that is a lot harder than it sounds. We knew it required a deep understanding of user experience, experts in deploying customer centric solutions, and a platform that enables iterations and measurement. So we decided to work with Salted Stone and deploy throughout the full HubSpot suite.”

 

— Tucker George, CEO, Rebel Internet

Together, Salted Stone and Rebel defined the engagement's core goals and objectives, as well as Rebel's most pressing pain points. Our solutions team then mapped out a new systems architecture that would enable Rebel to store data on customers and potential customers in a more consistent and easily reportable manner.

As a result of this process we identified the following actions to be taken:

• Build a responsive website to make the consumer’s buying experience reflect the new Rebel Branding.
• Integrate new APIs (e.g. Address, Payments, Credit Checks, Referrals) into the discovery and ordering processes to ensure all customers can be recommended the right products, and can have the ability to customise the products and services they want during the order journey.
• Create logic for the discovery process that would provide customers with a best-match solution based on their internet usage, number of users, and size of their property.
• Enable customers to complete and pay for their order after the discovery process.
• Create a new custom object to enable Rebel to track the progress of each order through pipelines and curate active, targeted follow-up if consumers abandon the journey at any of these stages.
• Create a bespoke solution for specific use cases in which one contact has more than one account in different locations - a blocker within their previous HubSpot Architecture. 
• Build a number of workflows to take advantage of automation, and reduce the need for Sales and Service staff internally thus reducing costs and improving profit margins.

“Rebel was suffering from an inability to understand and report on their customers effectively,” says Michael Peach, Solutions Lead at Salted Stone APAC. “They were struggling to evaluate each individual customer's value over time, and for a service company with multiple products and potentially multiple sales, including up-sells and down-sells, having that ability is key.”

Salted Stone’s approach

Salted Stone developed Rebel’s new website using HubSpot’s CMS Hub, with designs provided by Leagas Delaney. We also architected and implemented a newly optimised HubSpot system, integrated with Rebel's middleware, to provide the team with a streamlined, easy-to-manage sales funnel and improved reporting capabilities.

Collaborating with Rebel and using HubDB as a resource, we built logic into Rebel’s website that dynamically displays content based on connected reference tables and data mappings to ensure we only recommend and allow the purchase of products and services that are available at the consumers address, and meet their internet usage requirements.

These specific data relationships determine the content — such as order availability, bundle options, and start dates — that is displayed to customers based on their selected inputs. We used custom modules and HubDB tables to make some of the content editable so the Rebel team can test and iterate on different approaches and strategies without the need for re-development of the entire order journey.

Rebel provided an API that works together with HubSpot’s Serverless Function to pull pertinent information — including available appointments, voucher codes, bank details, and more — from other platforms in Rebel’s tech stack.

We also built a new “Discovery Journey” object, which enables:

• The tracking and management of online order journeys via customer address, an essential function for an ISP
• Customers to easily return and complete previously unfinished orders by re-entering their address
• Rebel to create customised nurture follow-ups for each stage of the Order Journey

Additionally, we designed an “Account” object, which acts as the central repository of data on a customer account, including the broadband product they signed up for, their service address, any add-ons they’ve purchased, and their current monthly payments. This information allows Rebel to easily assess the value of each account, including accounts that pay for Rebel services across multiple locations/properties.

We also created workflows for the following:

• Communicating to the CRM when orders or accounts have been cancelled.
• Updating properties from the Discovery Journey to the Account and Deal objects, such as shipping and activation.
• Sending emails to customers across the buyer’s journey, including when their order has been shipped.
• Sharing and using referral codes.

These workflows are automatically triggered according to specific criteria in HubSpot.

We created this flowmapp in order to visualise and refine Rebel's new HubSpot CRM Architecture.

The results

Salted Stone built Rebel a new, responsive website, along with an optimised and user-friendly Discovery and Order Journey process that communicates with their CRM to provide comprehensive reporting.

“We aren’t guessing anymore on what is working, we see it live in the performance data.”

— Tucker George, CEO, Rebel Internet

Rebel’s CEO, Tucker George, has this to say about the success of the project:  “The new customer experience is a complete game changer for customers and for our business. Our new responsive website expertly and efficiently explains the problems we solve and how uniquely we can solve those problems with our products and services. We have seen a massive increase in our repeat visits and customer orders which are all generated through the website. Furthermore, we built an unrivaled order experience that is the most efficient in the market.” 

Today, a customer can complete a new order with Rebel by visiting 2 pages and 10 button clicks. This is compared with 13 pages and 43 button clicks with the legacy market incumbent. As a result, Rebel experiences more leads, less fallout, a faster mean time to order, and importantly a lower cost of acquisition.

Since full deployment, Rebel now has a Contact / New Session rate over 15%, which is 50% higher than the target for e-commerce companies. Rebel now has a system in place to evaluate the entire customer experience, identify opportunities for refinement, and efficiently deploy optimisations. 

"It’s been rewarding to see what Rebel is able to do with their new website and automated workflows,” says Salted Stone Account Manager Alana Mulligan. “HubSpot is all about optimisation, and we’ve achieved that with this engagement.” 

Based on the outcomes of future testing phases and user engagement, Rebel’s Discovery and Order Journeys will continue to evolve over time — just as Rebel will continue to raise the bar in the UK Wi-Fi market.