June 28, 2023
TLDR: oxio’s website went from a typical ISP sign-up webform to an e-commerce style checkout experience powered by gaiia, resulting in a 6x lift in conversion rate and an increase of customer acquisition from ~20 customers per day to ~120.
oxio is a digital-first ISP in Canada that focuses on providing exceptional customer experience, transparent pricing, and accessible internet to Canadians.
From 2019 to 2022, oxio scaled from 0 to 50,000 customers, becoming Canada’s fastest growing ISP, while also achieving an average rating of 4.7/5 stars (planhub), and being recognized as Canada’s best-loved ISP.
‘Customer experience’ wasn’t just a buzz word used in oxio’s website copy; oxio’s customer service team had a First Response Time below 5 minutes, while covering three different time zones across Canada (PST, MST, EST) from 8am-10pm, seven days of the week, in two languages (English & French).
As a digitally-native ISP, the only way for potential customers to browse and subscribe to internet plans was through the oxio website. However, the existing webform checkout process required manual intervention from the internal support team, resulting in a longer time to onboard a new customer and a low conversion rate.
As of May 2021, oxio’s checkout flow consisted of a basic webform with fields for customers to chose a plan and input their address information. A Slack message was then sent to the internal support team to notify them of the new customer sign-up and create a task for the CSR to determine:
If all tasks were successful, the team would then:
Once the equipment arrived at the customer’s house and they were successfully activated, oxio could finally count that website visit as a conversion.
Rising Acquisition Costs and a Limited Marketing Budget Hampered Growth
oxio’s customer acquisition costs were increasing month over month, and traffic costs (CPCs) from their main acquisition channels were on the rise. The team knew that spending more money on advertising would only go so far with the current website conversion rate, and from a cash flow perspective, it was unsustainable long-term. oxio’s main acquisition channels included:
During peak season, oxio was acquiring ~ 20/ customer per day via the webform checkout, with an average customer acquisition cost of $87.
In June 2021, oxio introduced an updated checkout flow powered by gaiia. This checkout flow required no manual intervention and allowed website visitors to sign-up in less than 5 minutes.
Almost instantly after the updated checkout went live online, the same marketing channels that oxio was using to acquire customers, pushing out the exact same content, with the same daily budgets were acquiring significantly more customers. The conversion rate on the website had gone from 0.5% to 3% overnight; resulting in a $36 customer acquisition cost (58% decrease!).
After seeing the conversion rate sustain at ~3% of web traffic, the oxio team analyzed how each channel was contributing to new customer growth & what new opportunities they could capitalize on. The findings revealed three key takeaways:
After seeing the benefits of an upgraded checkout experience, the oxio team worked with gaiia to test and develop additional features to generate more revenue and further increase new customer acquisition. Two additional revenue driving features were:
Within the checkout experience oxio was able to display additional products & services that customers may be interested in. For example, oxio allowed customers to add multiple routers to their subscription. Approximately 10% of customers added an extra router, which resulted in those orders having a 12% higher ARPU every month.
The gaiia team implemented tracking snippets from Klaviyo (oxio’s ESP) in order to track exactly who was dropping off during the checkout process. The abandoned cart email journey consisted of three automated emails over a one-week period, reminding the customer that they hadn’t completed their checkout. The email journey on average resulted in an incremental ~ 5 new customers per day.
The fully integrated & customizable online checkout allowed for oxio to automate the provisioning process for new customers. Below are specific examples of how the online checkout automated a new customer activation in the backend, and resulted in less drop off from a customer reaching checkout to being activated:
oxio uploaded all addresses that they could provide internet service to; resulting in customers knowing immediately (in the first step of the checkout) if oxio was available for them, and reduced the amount of customers that the CSR team had to look up information on, and then email to turn down. oxio also kept a ‘waitlist’ of all customers who attempted to sign up, but were located in an unserviceable location. This allowed oxio to notify customers when their network expanded to new locations.
Based on pre-defined workflows, gaiia integrated with the necessary networks (TPIA) to provision the new customer's internet service, reducing the manual labor required from the oxio team. gaiia integrated with the networks even if there was no API access, using methods such as Email & Click-Through automations.
Based on the customers’ location & Network Integration, the gaiia checkout was able to determine if a technician was required for installation. If a technician was required, oxio was able to sync the technician’s calendar to the checkout and allow the customer to select from available dates & times.
In the backend, gaiia automatically allocates and reserves the appropriate equipment from inventory, creates a shipping label, and drops the order to oxio’s 3PL partner to ship the equipment. Removing all CSR responsibilities, and reducing a manual task that can lead to human error.
Once the equipment arrived at the customer's house and they were successfully activated, gaiia automatically starts the billing cycle. Based on the date of activation, the gaiia billing system automatically pro-rates customer’s monthly bill, and updates the customers first invoice accordingly.
As a result of these integrations, oxio not only increased website conversion but also enhanced customer support capacity by 29%, read more about how oxio increased CSR efficiency here.
As much as we love the oxio checkout and customer onboarding journey, don’t just take our word for it… see the 580 customer reviews on Planhub and the onboarding experience ratings.
June 28, 2023
