From an ERP and spreadsheets to interconnected tools.
A technical services SME in French-speaking Switzerland: a sales team, an office, technicians in the field. Here are the tools we put in place, the order in which they were rolled out, the measured results and the corrections made along the way.
- Sector
- Technical services, French-speaking Switzerland
- Teams
- Sales, office, field technicians
- Starting point
- An ERP, spreadsheets, emails
- Measured
- Over one month of operation
A growing SME, tools that had not kept up.
Enquiries came in from everywhere: the website form, ads, the phone, word of mouth. The ERP handled quotes and invoicing, but sales follow-up lived in spreadsheets and in everyone's inbox. Every day, the office copied the same information into several places.
Technicians got their instructions by phone and sent their photos back by messaging app. Clients called to ask "where's my file at?". Everyone was doing their best. What was missing was a system that connected them all.
Re-keying, forgotten follow-ups, hours lost every week.
The same data typed three times
Contacts, amounts and stages were copied between the ERP, spreadsheets and emails. The result: duplicates and versions that contradicted each other.
Enquiries left waiting
216 hours went by between an enquiry arriving and the first action. And the longer an enquiry waits, the colder the client gets.
Alerts nobody read any more
One notification per event, and a response rate below 7 %. Real emergencies were lost in the flood.
No way of knowing which channel paid off
Ad budget was split by gut feeling, with nothing linking where an enquiry came from to the final signature.
Phone calls to track every file
Documents sent and chased by email, signatures pending. The client had no overview, so they picked up the phone.
Five interconnected tools, rolled out one at a time.
We didn't replace everything at once. Each tool went live, got used and got measured before we rolled out the next one. The ERP stayed in place from start to finish.
- 01 · Sell
A CRM shaped around the sales team
Every enquiry lands in one place, cleaned up and without duplicates. Each one goes to the right salesperson by area, product and language, taking absences into account.
- Enquiries ranked by priority, Top 3 calls
- Meeting prep sheet
- Estimator calibrated on 241 real quotes
- 02 · Never forget a thing
AI agents for all the follow-up
The agents read sales emails and update the records. They draft signature and payment reminders, ask for a review when a job is finished and write the lost-deals report every month.
- Reminders during office hours
- Approved by the team
- A daily summary instead of alerts
- 03 · Reassure
A passwordless client portal
The client logs in with a link sent by email, follows the stages of their project, signs documents online and finds their invoices. The team uploads documents to sign directly there.
- Documents in three zones
- Time-stamped signature
- Choice of appointment slot
- 04 · Equip the field team
An app for technicians
Next job, directions, one-tap calling, the right documents. Photos are shrunk on the phone, then filed in the client's folder on their own.
- Confidential team schedule
- Documents without prices or contracts
- Photos that file themselves
- 05 · Connect
Sync with the ERP
Every hour, stages, amounts, signatures and invoices flow both ways. Safeguards block duplicates and never overwrite an amount. Every change is simulated first, then applied.
- Two-way sync
- Duplicate prevention
- One-click approvals
Interface preview, sample data
Time before the first action on an enquiry dropped from 216 to 95 hours, 56 % less. Each morning, every salesperson finds their Top 3 people to call back.
Every month, 67 hours of work are saved and 29 hours of capacity are added. Around 4 hours of supervision are enough to stay in control of what the agents do.
Some forty agents run nearly 64,000 automated tasks a month. When an important sales email arrives, the CRM record is up to date 3 to 14 minutes later, without anyone typing a line.
By tracking where each enquiry came from, we saw that enquiries from the website lead to a signature 2.3 times more often than those from paid social (16.9 % vs 7.2 %). Around CHF 20,000 a year of unprofitable advertising was spotted and cut.
The online price estimator draws on 241 real quotes. So the first conversation starts from a credible ballpark figure, not an "it depends".
Figures measured over one month of operation. No financial or individual data published, client anonymised.
The choices that worked, and the corrections we made.
- 01
One alert per event, and nobody reads it
Standard notifications got a response rate below 7 %. We replaced them with a short daily summary: fewer messages, and more of them acted on.
- 02
Measure usage, cut what isn't used
An agent spots the features and automations nobody uses. We remove them instead of piling more on. A simpler tool is one the team actually uses.
- 03
AI suggests, humans approve
Follow-ups and sensitive writes wait for an approval click. That's what gave the team confidence, and it's why they adopted the agents.
- 04
The ERP stays in charge
Replacing the ERP would have put the whole business on hold. By building around it, with strict safeguards, we could move forward one tool at a time.
- 05
Caution with small samples
A first series of automated follow-up emails reached around 17 % click-through on 103 emails. That's encouraging, but the sample is too small to draw conclusions. We keep measuring before turning it into a rule.
Your business
Let's measure the hours your team loses every week.
We start with an audit of your processes to spot the re-keying, the delays and the noise. Then we propose the first tools to put in place, with their price.