Netregistry leverages Salesforce to help small businesses succeed online

Netregistry started by selling domains and web hosting solutions that helped small and medium businesses (SMBs) take their first steps online. Today, Netregistry has expanded its portfolio and has supported more than 500,000 SMBs.

Products Used

Service Cloud

Sales Cloud

Marketing Cloud

Netregistry made its start in 1997 by selling domains and web hosting solutions that helped small and medium businesses (SMBs) take their first steps online. Today, Netregistry has expanded its portfolio to include web build and traffic driving digital marketing services and it has supported more than 500,000 SMBs.

“At Netregistry, we believe that Australian small businesses are the backbone of the economy and we provide a critical service, propelling small business digital success. Salesforce similarly provides us the tools to better serve our customers,” said Claire Williams, Executive General Manager at Netregistry.

At Netregistry, we believe that Australian small businesses are the backbone of the economy and we provide a critical service, propelling small business digital success. Salesforce similarly provides us the tools to better serve our customers.

Claire Williams

Executive General Manager, Netregistry

Unlocking success with Lightning

Netregistry began rolling out Salesforce in 2015. At the time, the company operated using a patchwork of other systems and wanted a more unified solution to help it scale. It switched on Service Cloud and Live Agent to streamline Customer Care before rolling out Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud to help grow its different brands. The only issue was that through organic growth and acquisition of other companies over time, Netregistry had increased complexity within Salesforce Classic and needed to simplify again.

“We made it to 2019 and then had to pick almost everything apart so that we could move to Salesforce Lightning and unlock all of the new features available,” said Williams. “The key difference with this implementation is that we took the approach of using clicks, not code to customise Salesforce and optimise its out of the box capabilities,” said Williams.

Netregistry managed the move to Lightning itself, tapping into the Salesforce Customer Success team and Trailhead whenever it needed support. As part of the move, Netregistry also switched to Omnichannel Routing for Live Chat, enabling the Customer Care team to have a more centralised view of customers’ accounts and prior interactions with the business while chatting with them. This contributes to a much more intuitive experience for the team, helping them to deliver faster support and contributing to a 12% year-on-year improvement in Customer Care Touchpoint NPS.

The move to Lightning has helped Netregistry to gain deeper insight on customer sentiment. After an interaction with the Customer Care team, customers are surveyed using GetFeedback and asked how satisfied they are with the service. Customer sentiment is calculated based on the survey data and is currently averaging 80%.

Personalising customer journeys

Netregistry’s sales and marketing teams have also benefited from Lightning as it has helped to streamline and personalise the entire customer journey. Annie Mackin, Chief Customer & Operations Officer, said that this journey often starts when a customer needs a domain and evolves from there.

“Once we’ve acquired a customer and set them up with a domain, it opens the door for us to help support them with website build and grow their business digitally. Salesforce helps us to capture that opportunity by reaching out to customers at each stage of their small business evolution and tailoring our communications appropriately,” said Mackin.

These communications include automated journeys, triggered based on customer behaviour. For example, if a customer purchases a domain for personal use, they will automatically be put on a simple welcome journey. If they purchase a domain for business, then their journey will be more complex and include cross-promotion of relevant products.

Orchestrating these journeys through Marketing Cloud eliminates the time spent creating lists and sending emails manually. It also provides marketing with detailed reporting so that they can review and optimise performance. This is helping Netregistry to drive improvements to email open rates and click through rates, and increase lead generation.

“We’ve never been able to personalise communications in this way before Marketing Cloud, and it has significantly improved campaign relevance as well as time to market,” said Mackin. “Using Email Studio within Marketing Cloud, we can also design emails with a more purposeful creative look and feel that makes them more compelling.”

Building on these benefits, Netregistry is now using Social Studio for social listening and Ad Studio to manage online advertising. Coupled with reporting from Google, Ad Studio has helped the company be more targeted in its advertising and make decisions based on fact rather than intuition. “It has fundamentally changed our performance culture and helped us to become much more data driven,” said Mackin.

Rising to new challenges

Prior to the start of COVID-19, Netregistry had planned to continue its transformation with a new call centre solution. It had decided on Amazon Connect, in part because it could be integrated with Service Cloud. However, before this implementation took place, the pandemic began to escalate and Netregistry’s first priority was to enable remote working so that it could keep customers safe and continue to support customers.

Most of Netregistry’s employees had never worked from home, so it was a big change culturally, but in Australia everyone had access to computers and were able to access Salesforce and other business apps from the cloud. The bigger challenge for Netregistry was the impact on its Customer Care team in the Philippines. In mid-March, new domestic travel restrictions were introduced in the Philippines that meant only a handful of Netregistry’s staff were able to make it into the office. This led the company to temporarily switch off the phone lines for Customer Care.

“It was a very difficult decision, but knowing we have an average of 20,000 calls a month, it would have been impossible for our severely reduced team to keep up,” explained Williams. “We felt the better customer experience was to service customers in a timely way through chat and online enquiries - setting response expectations, instead of having long phone hold times.”

To provide customers with an alternative means of support, Netregistry quickly skilled up its sales team to provide support via live chat and began arranging laptops and internet connectivity for team members in the Philippines so they could do the same. Soon, the average number of live chat enquiries went from 200 to 700 per day and there was a massive effort from everyone to keep on top of them.

“We were innovating rapidly behind the scenes to improve the speed of service,” said Williams. “This included analysing data in Salesforce to predict and prepare for spikes in activity and filtering chats to different individuals based on their skills. All of this helped us reduce the average queue size and lower abandon rates for chat.”

Towards the end of March, Netregistry switched off its sales phone lines too and turned on sales chat in its place. This allowed the company to focus its resources on supporting customers via chat and support cases in Service Cloud while working to get the Customer Care team back online completely.

Throughout this time, the team worked hard to reduce abandoned chats, resulting in a decrease from over 15% in early April to less than 2% by mid-June.

“What impressed me most during this time was the team’s resilience, especially in Manilla where employees had additional challenges with getting access to computers and the internet. I’m also proud to say that we’ve not faltered in our focus on meeting customer needs,” said Williams. “We have been living and breathing in Salesforce and refreshing dashboards by the minute so that we can manage our queue volumes in real-time and keep improving service.”

Getting business back online

Netregistry ultimately decided to accelerate the implementation of Amazon Connect so that it could operate a virtual call centre for both sales and service. The rollout was compressed into two weeks, going live in a staged release from 2 June. Running concurrently with this project, 110 staff were given access to the tools they needed to work remotely through Amazon Workspaces, in a rapid end-to-end deployment over four days.

Employees are now back to taking calls with the added benefit of having a view of each customer in Salesforce as they pick up the phone. At the same time, Williams believes that chat will continue to be an important channel for Netregistry. She says some other changes are also likely to stay, such as improvements in collaboration and flexible working.

“Our whole approach to work is being redefined at the moment, and we’ve found that everyone is collaborating better and working productively from home,” said Williams. “Everyone’s also been very purposeful about checking in and supporting one another, and while management has been trying to lead the way with this, our people are leading even better.”

95 %

calls answered in under 1 min

Rising to new challenges

Throughout this time, the team worked hard to reduce abandoned chats, resulting in a decrease from over 15% in early April to less than 2% by mid-June.