Plico is a West Australian clean energy company that is building the sustainable energy grid of the future. Plico provides its members with a solar and battery solution on a subscription basis, with no big upfront costs. Plico allows members (currently from communities across WA, but ultimately across Australia) to generate and consume their own clean power, with each individual system aggregated back into a virtual power plant (VPP) which feeds back into the local energy grid. Plico’s vision is to make clean energy accessible to as many Australians as possible and to be the largest community owned clean energy company in the world.
As a startup with great ambitions, Plico needed to improve its new customer sign up process whilst ensuring data security.
The sales team was handling sensitive customer and identity documents (eg. Driver Licence numbers) to run credit checks as part of the sign up process.
Each credit check was done manually by the team. It was lengthy and cumbersome and became the biggest bottleneck in the sign up process.
Plico was in a significant growth phase where demand for solar energy kept increasing continuously and needed to really scale its customer signup rate
The customer signup process was taking a long time to complete all the necessary steps
Plico was using platforms and solutions that weren’t corrected to HubSpot
We developed a thorough custom integration between 3 platforms used by Plico:
The webservice we developed bridges the gap between Jotform, Experian and HubSpot, while allowing for a smooth user experience, removing back and forth between the sales team and the customer.
Customer fills out sign up form
Sales team collects form data and runs credit check manually
Sales team updates client’s Contact and Deal records in HubSpot
Sales team sends email to customer telling them about the outcome of their application, with either a link to pay their sign up fee, or a link to run a manual credit check done by the client using another credit reporting agency
Customer fills out sign up form
The Webservice runs the credit check with Experian and updates Hubspot’s Deal and Contact records accordingly
Customer is redirected to a Thank-you page or a Membership payment page depending on results of their credit check
Next steps in the process are triggered automatically
In addition to that, the integration we developed comes with more services and features:
We also customised HubSpot heavily to further enhance the impact of the solution
- Deals to move to the next stage
- Alerts for HubSpot admins in case the integration or the Experian API has issues
- Tasks for the operations team with next steps for their clients
"Prior to the implementation of the solution by TH Digital, the team would need to individually extract the required data for each credit check application by copying and pasting it into the credit check application. This was a labour-intensive process and at times required double handling of data. The automation of the credit check not only reduced the overhead for the team but also allowed us to put rigorous controls around the input data to the credit check as well as the visibility of data received bolstering protection of sensitive data."
Over 1,139 credit checks automated (and counting!)
Time in Stage Credit Check Pending went from 10.4 days before this integration, down to 20.2 hours now
More time for the sales team to work on other parts of the customer onboarding process, leading to a Time from Opportunity to Customer decreased by 4.45%
HubSpot has become the centre of the whole new client onboarding process
Customers can now execute in 1 step what used require back-and-forth with the Plico sales team
The Plico Sales team fully understands how HubSpot helps them close more deals
