hipages gets tradies started on its platform faster with Agentforce.

With Agentforce and Data 360, hipages can complete tradie verification checks in near real-time and provide more personalised support.

About the company

hipages is an online marketplace that connects tradies with homeowners. The company also provides tradies with an app to help them manage the jobs they’ve won and streamline administration.

The Challenge

Unlock data and AI to improve customer experience and retention.

hipages has used Salesforce for 18 years to drive the growth of its operations. As use of the marketplace scaled, hipages looked to Salesforce for additional efficiencies and insights to improve customer experience and retention.

The hipages’ business model relies on a high level of trust as homeowners invite tradies into their homes and rely on their expertise to do the job they’ve been contracted to do. This necessitates a number of checks for each tradie, including verifying IDs, qualifications, and business registration.

Historically, the processes for essential checks were manual. With hipages bringing on roughly 1,500 tradies each month, it began to take a few days to complete verifications and get new tradies up and running.

hipages also had a wealth of data trapped within its online tradie marketplace that was difficult for customer-facing teams to leverage without excessive costs and time spent on data management.

The siloed data and the need for teams to navigate between multiple systems slowed down onboarding and customer service. It also limited the insights available to retain customers and close new deals.

How Salesforce Helps

Data 360 improves operational visibility and provides foundation for AI success.

With Data 360, hipages has connected and activated its data to transform engagement with its tradie community.

Integration with Databricks, for example, provides greater visibility of operational data such as leads claimed and won by each tradie, as well as ongoing revenue from those leads.

In the past, it was difficult to pull this data together in a way that was meaningful and easy to use, but it can now be surfaced in near real-time to support customer engagement and renewals.

hipages is also now using Tableau to bring this data into the flow of work to support data-driven conversations and smarter decisions.

“With the power of Data 360, we now have a single pane of glass across our operations and can surface rich data to help tradies see their return on investment from our platform,” said Jeremy Burton, CTO, hipages Group.

Data 360 also supports hipages journey to become an agentic enterprise by providing Agentforce with the context and data it needs to act with accuracy.

Agentforce boosts productivity and helps tradies get up and running faster.

With Agentforce, hipages has reduced the time and complexity involved in verifying tradies’ licenses and business registrations.

When a new tradie signs up to hipages, Agentforce uses context from Data 360 to determine the types of licenses and registrations that need to be verified. It then connects to various third-party systems to complete those verifications.

While hipages is still adding new integrations to automate all of the verification checks required, it has already reduced turnaround time for some checks by as much as 90% with some completed in near real-time. hipages has also reduced the risk of human error involved, which enhances the trust that Australian homeowners can have in engaging the tradies they find on the hipages platform.

Agentforce to reshape sales and service.

Agentforce Sales and Sales Engagement automate processes like lead assignment and ensure the optimal cadence to drive conversion. Agentforce Sales has also helped hipages to reduce the median time to contact new leads from 16 minutes to just six whilst increasing its first call contact rate from 29% to 36%.

Agentforce Service helps the contact centre to manage enquiries and issues that arise during project work.

The company has more recently adopted Salesforce Voice and omni-channel routing for a more integrated way to manage customer enquiries.

Agentforce will bring greater efficiency to sales and service by augmenting hipages' workforce with digital labour and freeing team members up for higher value work. For instance, hipages envisions Agentforce working side-by-side its employees, providing in-the-moment recommendations to personalise service and product packages.

“There’s a huge opportunity and exciting future ahead for us as we use Agentforce to leverage all of our existing innovation on the Salesforce platform to make life easier for our employees and tradies,” said Burton.

The Salesforce Difference

Data 360 has helped to eliminate data silos and provide fresh visibility of the operational platform data that underpins the hipages product. With Agentforce, hipages is building on its 18 years of innovation with Salesforce and using trusted AI to make life easier for employees and tradies.

How hipages did it

hipages partnered with Salesforce consulting partner J4RVIS to propel its data and AI transformation. A key lesson learned was to start small and evolve, focusing on fixing processes before automating everything.

The company chose an initial minimum viable product (MVP) focused on checking just a few licenses, which was a critical path to getting the solution live. Another lesson was to sit closely with users and gather their feedback to integrate agents more seamlessly into workflows. This iterative and human-centred approach has been crucial in hipages’ early AI success.