hipages is Australia’s #1 marketplace for connecting homeowners with trusted tradespeople (or “tradies”) — a platform born in 2004 from a Sydney garage and grown into a national engine moving millions of home-improvement jobs every year. Today, hipages serves over four million Australians, connects more than 33,000 tradies to real work, sees about 1.3 million jobs a year, and a new job hits the platform roughly every 25 seconds.
In a marketplace that moves that fast, support isn’t a back office. It’s the bloodstream. A slow reply means a job stalls. A misrouted question means a tradie loses time they can’t earn back. The marketplace wasn’t slowing down, but the operations supporting it were stretched to their limits.
To stay fast, resilient, and reliable, hipages relies on a unified Sendbird stack built on delight.ai, Salesforce Connector, and Sendbird Chat. Together, these products form the backbone of every customer and tradie interaction across the marketplace.
A marketplace that thrives on clarity and speed
Every hipages job starts with a homeowner posting a task and ends with a tradie getting hired. But between those moments sits a complex mesh of expectations—lead quality, timing, billing, account access, and the need to talk to the right person at the right time.
Tradies often want quick clarification or reassurance:
- Was this lead worth the spend?
- I need to change my password
- Can someone from hipages call me?
hipages supports thousands of these moments every day. Some require a simple answer. Some need a quick callback from an Account Manager. Others need to go straight to human support for review.
Jeremy Burton, CTO of hipages put it plainly: when a tradie has a problem, “it’s really critical they can get speedy service to get back online, claiming those jobs and getting the work that they need to run their businesses.”
What used to be a high-friction landscape is now a coordinated flow powered by Sendbird.
Build vs. Buy: hipages chose time-to-value
hipages didn’t land on this path by chance. Like any strong engineering team, their first instinct was: we can build this ourselves. An in-house AI agent, custom workflows, stitched system-to-system handoffs. But as they dug deeper, the tradeoffs became impossible to ignore. They needed a partner who already understood the terrain and could move at the pace the marketplace demanded.
“AI is moving too fast to be treated like a traditional build. It’s a new space, evolving in real time. We didn’t have all the specialist expertise in-house, and trying to develop it ourselves would have slowed us down. Partnering lets us move faster, learn faster, and deliver value to our marketplace much sooner.”
– Jeremy Burton, CTO of hipages
The power of the full Sendbird stack
Choosing not to build meant choosing a platform they could trust end to end. And for hipages, that meant looking for a single system that could carry every interaction—from the first homeowner message to the final support handoff—without breaking rhythm.
“We weren’t looking for a stack of point solutions. We needed a single, cohesive platform that could support the entire customer journey end to end. delight.ai + Sendbird comms suite is the only way to support the full customer experience for businesses like ours.”
– Jeremy Burton, CTO of hipages
The heartbeat: Sendbird Chat
At the center of hipages is a constant pulse of communication: tradies updating homeowners, homeowners clarifying details, both sides trying to move from quote to completion without friction. Sendbird Chat is the heartbeat of that pulse, keeping every conversation inside the hipages app where the real work begins and ends. Nothing gets lost. Nothing drifts to another channel. It’s one continuous thread that helps tradies and homeowners stay aligned, on track, and confident as the job unfolds.
The dual-layer advantage: One engine for marketplace & support
One of hipages’ superpowers is that the same chat experience powering tradie ↔ homeowner conversations also powers tradie ↔ hipages support. The entire marketplace runs on a single communication engine, which means tradies never switch apps, never juggle inboxes, and never rethink how to get help.
Because Sendbird already handled the user-to-user conversations that make the marketplace work, it became the natural choice to handle support as well. The result is rare continuity: one thread for doing the work and one thread for resolving issues, all inside the environment tradies use every day.
“We already trusted Sendbird to carry the conversations that matter most: tradies talking to homeowners. Support had to match that experience. It had to feel just as familiar and just as fast. When we realized we could run both on the same platform, it was an easy decision. It made the whole experience simpler and more intuitive for our tradies. It gave us continuity we’d been chasing for years.”
– Jeremy Burton, CTO of hipages
The brain: Delight.ai for always-on support
Delight.ai meets tradies at their pace. They’re moving between jobs, juggling calls, working in tight spaces, and they need straight answers fast. They reach out when a lead doesn’t look right, when a charge needs clarification, when they need more jobs coming in, or when a homeowner goes quiet at the wrong time.
These aren’t abstract questions—they’re the small decisions that shape a tradie’s week and their income. Delight.ai responds instantly with clear, contextual guidance, absorbing the everyday issues that once slowed the team down. By handling the bulk of these routine but important questions, it helps tradies stay productive and helps hipages keep the trades economy moving.
The bridge: Salesforce Connector for seamless handoff
Some moments still need a human. When a tradie asks for their Account Manager, their Premium Account Manager, or help from the support team, the system shifts seamlessly. The Salesforce Connector acts as the bridge, moving the entire conversation — every message, every detail, every signal — straight into Salesforce without losing context. A case is created automatically, it lands with the right person immediately, and the tradie stays right where they are. The tradie doesn’t have to start over or repeat anything. The handoff just happens, and the hipages team picks it up with everything they need to help.
“Our agents never ask for context anymore—because they already have it. That alone changed our entire support operation.”
– Jeremy Burton, CTO of hipages
A message to other marketplaces
For hipages, one lesson stands out: don’t assemble your support stack in pieces. Marketplace operations move too fast, and the handoffs are too interconnected, for communication, intelligence, and escalation to live in separate systems. Fragmentation creates gaps—small at first, then costly. And users feel the inconsistency long before you notice it in the metrics.
Or as Jeremy puts it: “A single platform built to handle the whole journey will always outperform a stack you have to glue together yourself.”
Building the future of marketplace support together
Since unifying their support stack with Sendbird, hipages has seen a clear shift in both speed and confidence across their support operation. Even early on, the human impact was obvious. Delight.ai removed repetitive tasks—like creating callback requests—freeing the team to focus on higher-value, more complex problems.
The result, as Jeremy put it, is simple: “morale is up, and agents are doing more interesting, meaningful work.”
That kind of change doesn’t happen without a true partner. It required a team that understood the operational reality of a two-sided marketplace and stayed deeply involved beyond launch. The delight.ai forward deployment team worked directly with hipages to tune models, pressure-test edge cases, and align the system to real tradie behavior. The process was iterative, fast, and hands-on—exactly what hipages needed to scale with confidence.
And for hipages, this is just the beginning. As Jeremy said, “we’re just at the start of that… and it’s going to be a great journey.”
