For many people, home ownership is a lifelong dream. More than a financial investment, it’s a symbol of independence, stability and personal pride. But in Australia’s booming market, owning a home can be particularly challenging. In 2020, ABC News Australia estimated that home prices increased by an astonishing $600 per day. The trend continued in 2021, as prices increased by 20% while wages increased by just 1.7%. Prospective buyers felt that while a mortgage might be manageable, saving for a deposit was not. That’s where FrontYa came in—with a new and newsworthy partnership model.

Founded in October 2021, FrontYa introduced a way to bridge the deposit gap—doubling buyers’ down payments with no interest, no up-front costs, no monthly repayments, no hidden fees and no need for personal guarantees. By unlocking more borrowing capacity, the company helps people own a home sooner and accelerate their financial returns. FrontYa’s initial investment is returned within six years along with a percentage of the increase in the property’s value.

As a startup with unique business processes, FrontYa wanted to create an easy-to-use self-service portal that would allow customers to explore the offering on their own terms and without sales pressure. That interface also had the potential to provide important customer insights that would support the company’s marketing efforts, users and future growth.

The Slalom team jumped right into discovery to better understand FrontYa’s complex business model. The company had established its visual branding, developed wireframes and created an interim website, but the customer onboarding process was still predominantly manual. The goal was to launch a self-service experience as quickly as possible.

“When you launch a product to the public, what you think you need to do and what you actually need to do can be very different,” says Robbie Baskin, co-founder and chief risk officer at FrontYa. “Customers, mortgage brokers and our staff all interact on our site—and they’re all handling the same data.”

The first phase of the work focused on the portal. FrontYa had a novel business model and a blank canvas on which to design a perfectly tailored customer experience—and knew that Salesforce Experience Cloud was the right platform for the job. Leadership was ready to partner with Slalom shoulder to shoulder, day-to-day to create the best possible solution.

The customer portal needed to be seamless—making it easy to explore the offering, submit applications and properties, upload employment information and tax documents and receive results. We began by developing the user interface based on the existing process outlines. Then, as the Slalom team demonstrated the full capabilities of Salesforce, we were able to anticipate and address new and different customer behaviours.

Together, we determined which systems were necessary to enable each scenario. “The best part of this project was the collaboration,” says Dattaraj Deshmukh, a principal at Slalom. “The FrontYa team understood the challenges and provided great feedback—and that made it possible to create an outstanding customer experience.”

To support the complexity of the business model and integrate with third-party systems, the Slalom team developed a fully customised front end, complete with visual branding. With a new responsive interface, FrontYa can provide a unified experience for users on any device, including laptop, mobile and tablet. In just a few months, the new site was launched.

With the front end complete, the team was ready to explore the data architecture. For FrontYa, it was imperative that customers could navigate the site on their own terms, without spam or sales pressure. At the same time, the company needed user data to enable targeted marketing strategies. We worked together to identify challenges and opportunities.

“For me, it’s about helping FrontYa be more streamlined and deliberate in its approach. But the other side was the analytics—it became a fact-finding mission, a way to actually communicate with customers,” says Clancy Brodrick, a principal at Slalom.

The portal captured visitor data, but it didn’t include enough information for FrontYa to tailor its marketing efforts. We integrated Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with Google AdWords, allowing the company to discover how users arrived at its site. Once there, the system tracks customer journeys anonymously until users submit an email address and officially become prospects. Only at that point does FrontYa attribute behaviours to specific individuals in order to tailor its communications. Salesforce Social Studio allows the company to create filtered prospect lists to deliver targeted advertising on various social media platforms.

“The Slalom team and I were able to translate our novel business ideas into a seamless customer experience while educating us on the platform along the way,” says Baskin. Thanks to a high level of collaboration, FrontYa now has the knowledge and skills it needs to maintain the new Salesforce solution. To enable internal teams, Slalom provided training and developed a background configuration simple enough for anyone to use.

“What we actually achieved was much more than we set out to. With that level of client engagement, we were able to provide more value,” says Brodrick. That value, of course, is that FrontYa has the right tools to establish insight-driven marketing practices, long-term customer relationships and a home-buying experience like no other.