A complicated sales funnel
As the UK’s first online mortgage broker, Better.co.uk is dedicated to making it easier and more convenient for Britons to find the best mortgage deal possible.
Mortgages are such a big decision for prospective buyers so Better.co.uk nurtures their leads at every stage of the customer journey, from ‘Researchers’, who are just beginning to browse, to ‘Transactors’, who are ready to start their mortgage journey, which itself can take weeks.
“Getting a mortgage is usually the biggest financial decision in a customer’s life,” Director of Revenue Operations Tom Hodgson says. “Customers often go through a very long research phase. What’s important is creating a journey that allows customers to flow through.”
Improve cross-team collaboration
Each team used its own tools, which created an inconsistent journey for customers. Marketing worked with Mailchimp, Sales team had their own internally-built tools. Customer communications were created manually, with macro templates sent out through Gmail. Finally, Operations worked primarily in Excel spreadsheets.
Better.co.uk needed to improve cross-functional communication and standardise communications to create a smoother customer journey:
“Our processes were more manual, which meant they were more inconsistent. From a customer perspective, it might have felt like they were falling between gaps, getting shifted from team to team,” Tom says.
Improving customer data collection
In order to better serve their customers, Better.co.uk also needed better data, especially at an individual customer level. Without cross-functional data collection, they could not build a complete view of customer interactions through the sales funnel.
“You can’t drive a business without having a really good view of data,” Tom says. “It's important to know from a business management perspective, but also really important for employees and competitive sales individuals to understand how they are all performing and interacting.”
Creating a consistent customer journey with HubSpot
With HubSpot, Better.co.uk was able to bring Marketing, Sales, and Operations onto a single platform to create a unified customer journey. Their branding and tone are standardised across communications. Customer data is centralised so that any team member can easily pick up communications without creating continuity issues for their customers.
“Bringing in HubSpot has allowed us to solve a number of business and organisational challenges,” Tom says. “It makes it much easier for sales, ops and marketing to work together, both before and after the sale.”
15+ automated journeys
Better.co.uk created more than 15 personalised journeys based on different customer pathways. They’ve been able to create more content and shorter journeys to nurture ‘Researchers’ who aren’t ready to transact yet, while still creating a frictionless purchase experience for ‘Transactors’ who are ready to move forward.
HubSpot’s form builder also allows Better.co.uk to speak to customers in earlier stages of the funnel, opening up more opportunities to nurture leads at the start of the customer journey.
“We’ve used HubSpot forms to capture details and speak to customers who want an initial consultation without having to do a 10-minute online customer journey,” Tom says. “It's allowed us to open a new channel.”
Valuable integrations
Better.co.uk uses HubSpot’s integrations to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. They’ve integrated HubSpot with their internal customer data management system, Aircall, Zapier, and their SMS provider, allowing them to build a complete multi-touchpoint experience for their customers.
They use HubSpot for less obvious purposes too, like capturing and storing customer consent for compliance and auditing.
“By using a mix of capturing consents and recorded phone lines, we can be very confident that we’re compliant for a number of activities that need to happen in a regulated environment,” Tom says. “ using HubSpot for compliance wouldn’t be immediately obvious.”
An integrated system for a multi-touchpoint strategy
Using HubSpot allowed Better.co.uk to design a multi-touchpoint customer contact strategy, increasing customer contact rates and the number of customer touch points. “We couldn’t have done that when we had unintegrated systems,” Tom says. “It really felt transformational for the business.”
Using callback forms, abandoned basket and automated renewal emails has also helped them nurture customers earlier in the funnel, leading to a 50% incremental growth in meaningful interactions with customers
HubSpot has become vital for Better.co.uk's business operations, Tom concludes.
“It's one of the core business functions and sits cross-functionally,” he says. “We've been able to apply it to lots of use cases that we hadn't initially considered and are continuing to build more workflows in HubSpot that allow us to keep scaling.”
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