Quote automation
From an e-mail to a ready quote. The full stream of enquiries handled without growing the team.
~190
enquiries in the first 2 weeks
24/7
real-time response
0
lost enquiries
~19,000
products in the catalogue
Client
Mal-Drew is a building materials retailer. Its range covers more than 19,000 products: structural materials, construction chemicals and finishing elements.
Problem
The company received more requests for quotes than the team could handle by hand. Preparing a single quote took several steps:
- reading the e-mail and understanding what the customer needs,
- finding matching products in a catalogue of thousands of items,
- calculating quantities and describing the selection.
With a handful of sales reps, some e-mails went unanswered. The customer waited and went to a competitor. The company was losing sales not for lack of stock, but for lack of time to reply.
Solution
We built a system that does all the repetitive work for the sales rep. The person stays in charge of the decision: they check the ready quote and approve it with one click.
It runs on the same process behind almost every automation we build: first gather the data, then analyse it, then review the available options and finally pick the best one. In practice it looks like this:
Gathering data
When an e-mail arrives at Mal-Drew, the system captures it within the same second, at any time of day or night. Nothing waits in a queue and no enquiry gets lost.
Analysis
The system reads the enquiry and breaks it down into specific needs: what the customer is building and which materials they need for it. A loose description becomes an ordered list of requirements.
Catalogue review
Based on that list, the system searches all 19,000 products and selects those that genuinely fit the project. It works like a search engine that understands the meaning of the enquiry, not just individual words.
Choosing the best quote
From the matching products the system assembles a ready proposal with quantities and creates a draft in the shop system.
Human decision
The sales rep sees the ready quote, checks it and approves it with one click or corrects it. Only then does the customer receive the quote as a PDF and an e-mail explaining the selection. This step closes the loop: the system remembers the rep's corrections and prepares the next quote more accurately.
Why you can rely on it
- Real-time response, 24 hours a day.
- An e-mail is marked as handled only after the quote has been prepared correctly, so no enquiry silently drops out.
- If an error occurs, the system automatically retries and gets back to work.
Results
- Around 190 enquiries handled in roughly two weeks.
- Around 90 backlogged e-mails from before the launch caught up.
- Around 80 spam and irrelevant messages filtered out automatically.
- Zero lost enquiries.
Result: the company handles the full stream of enquiries and did not have to hire anyone new to do it.
Technology
Have a similar process to automate?
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