Big Red Group builds brand loyalty and trust with world-class customer experience

Founded in 2017, Big Red Group (BRG) is the largest experience marketplace in Australia and New Zealand. The company evolved from RedBalloon and has expanded through the strategic acquisition of brands such as Adrenaline, Lime&Tonic, and Experience Oz and Experience Oz Local Agent. 

These brands partner with thousands of small business suppliers to deliver inclusive and sustainable experiences that deliver positive change to the communities and stakeholders BRG serves. 

“Our mission is to shift the way people experience life. We get to do that by supporting our small business partners (our experience providers) to trade their craft and by offering our customers to choose more stories and more connection over more stuff,” said David Anderson, Group CEO and Co-founder of Big Red Group. 

Salesforce supports BRG’s goal to serve an experience every second by 2030 by helping the company build trust with customers, deepen relationships with suppliers, and empower employees. The ongoing partnership began four years ago and has already helped BRG narrow the gap from one experience served every minute to one served nearly every twenty seconds.

BRG first turned to Salesforce to remove complexity from its business and get back to basics. Layers of technology and poorly implemented applications were a source of frustration for employees and made it costly to scale. More to the point, BRG had lost connection with its customers. It acquired customers one at a time and treated them all the same. There was no differentiation as to whether someone was making their first purchase or tenth.

“Our ambition is to work towards a product-led organisation that puts customers at the heart of our product strategy. The ambition, the product, the work, the roadmap, the growth, and the purpose come together in a workplace that we are proud of and attracts exceptional talent,” said Anderson. 

BRG started by consolidating the systems used to manage customer relationships across brands. For example, with Service Cloud and Natterbox from the AppExchange, the company consolidated and streamlined customer support. It is now exploring opportunities to make service more efficient by introducing new channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, and self-service bots. 

“Our investment in Salesforce enabled us to design our sales and service processes for a multi-brand environment. With automations allowing for seamless generation, matching, and management of customers across our different brands from a single customer record. These automations, enabled by Salesforce Flow, have facilitated reporting on our service levels and customer satisfaction without imposing more data entry on our team.  In the past, we had no way of knowing whether customers were satisfied with our service, now the process is smoother and our CSAT is 4.2,” said Andrew Kallio, Senior Salesforce Administrator at Big Red Group.

BRG has achieved further consolidation in marketing. The company has reduced seven email platforms down to two and now uses Marketing Cloud to engage customers with automated and personalised nurture journeys. For BRG’s Adrenaline brand, this move to Marketing Cloud has helped increase click-through rates by 35%.  

Anticipating a cookieless future, BRG has also started to build out its first-party data in Marketing Cloud. 

“The changing data legislative landscape is creating a privacy paradox. Customers are sceptical as to the use of their data but still seek a personalised experience. Continuing to earn our customers' trust and the right to use their data to personalise at scale is a critical challenge for us, alongside all credible retail businesses,” said Anderson. 

BRG is also transforming e-commerce to deliver a smoother, more personalised buying experience. BRG is RedBalloon’s only brand on Commerce Cloud and its mobile conversion rate is frequently .5 - .7% higher than all other brands in the portfolio.  Conversion rate is the most sensitive metric inside BRG and it aims to improve this by fully leveraging its personalisation martech to provide an even better mobile-first e-commerce experience. This will involve implementing some elements of a headless architecture alongside Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA). 

BRG has engaged Salesforce Professional Services to help drive its transformation. The Professional Services team provided initial guidance on BRG’s roadmap and architecture and is now lending its platform expertise to maximise the value of the solutions deployed. This includes a visioning exercise to reorganise the company’s strategic technology program and ensure all components fit together seamlessly.

BRG’s continued investments in technology and marketing will build on the impressive results it has already achieved. These include an increase in brand preference and 4x growth in revenue over the past five years. 

BRG’s acquisitions are of course key to its growth, and the company made what some may consider a bold move by acquiring Experience Oz and Experience Oz Local Agent during the pandemic. However, BRG’s data modelling gave it the confidence to continue investments and acquisitions during this time. 

BRG uses Tableau extensively to analyse and visualise its performance and suppliers’ sales, so it turned to Tableau to forecast when things would bounce back after experiencing a dip in sales early in the pandemic. As part of this exercise, BRG found its sales correlated strongly to a public dataset tracking consumer mobility. Consequently, BRG was confident and ready to act when that dataset projected a return to normal. 

“We grew nearly 30% year-on-year during the pandemic, and one of the reasons we were able to grow so significantly during that time is because we were able to make smart decisions informed by our investments in data,” said Anderson.

BRG is now exploring ways to open up its data to suppliers so they can analyse their own performance and identify opportunities to improve. This could include a portal on Experience Cloud where suppliers could access other tools and information to manage their relationship with BRG. 

Nearly 80% of the company’s suppliers are small and family-owned businesses that employ five people or less and BRG is committed to helping them succeed. For this reason, the company ran a ‘know-your-supplier’ campaign in the first half of 2022 and met face-to-face with more than 600 suppliers. Insights from these meetings were captured in Sales Cloud for a 360-degree view of suppliers.

“One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from our competitors is through our investment in supplier relationships, and that’s why we are more disciplined than ever in capturing information that helps us to understand the pressures they face and build more meaningful partnerships,” said Anderson. 

Sometimes, this involves investing in suppliers to offer customers new and enhanced experiences. For instance, BRG has partnered with Gold Coast-based Go Ballooning to launch a new wheelchair-accessible hot air ballooning experience. 

“In an increasingly changing world, our ability to maintain strong, trusted relationships with our customers and suppliers is more important than ever and will provide a foundation on which we can continue to build consistent growth,” said Anderson.