An ERP, spreadsheets, endless re-keying. Then a system that runs itself.
A technical services SME in French-speaking Switzerland, with a sales team, an office and technicians in the field. Here's what we built with them, in what order, what it changed, and what we'd do differently.
- Sector
- Technical services, French-speaking Switzerland
- Teams
- Sales, office, field technicians
- Starting point
- An ERP, spreadsheets, emails
- Measured
- Over one month of operation
A business growing faster than its tools.
Enquiries came in from everywhere: the website form, ads, phone, referrals. The ERP handled quotes and invoicing, but sales follow-up lived in spreadsheets and in everyone's inbox. The office copied the same information into several places, every single day.
In the field, technicians got their briefings by phone and sent their photos back by messaging app. On the client side, the same question kept coming: "where's my file at?". Nobody lacked goodwill. What was missing was a system connecting everyone.
What was costing hours without anyone noticing.
The same data typed three times
Contacts, amounts and stages copied between the ERP, spreadsheets and emails. Ending in duplicates and conflicting versions.
Leads left waiting
216 hours passed between an enquiry arriving and the first action. And the longer an enquiry waits, the colder it gets.
Alerts nobody read any more
One notification per event: a response rate below 7 %. Real emergencies got lost in the flood.
No way of knowing which channel paid off
Ad budget was split by gut feeling, with no link between a lead's source and the final signature.
Phone calls to track every file
Documents sent and chased by email, signatures pending, and no overview for the client.
Five building blocks, laid one after another.
We didn't replace everything at once. Each block went live, got used, got measured, and only then was the next one plugged in. The ERP stayed in place from start to finish.
- 01 · Sell
A CRM shaped around the sales team
Every lead source lands in one place, cleaned and deduplicated. Each enquiry is assigned to the right salesperson by area, product and language, taking absences into account.
- Heat score and 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 records, draft signature and payment reminders, ask for reviews when a job is finished, and write the monthly lost-deals report.
- Reminders during office hours
- Approved by the team
- A daily digest instead of alerts
- 03 · Reassure
A passwordless client portal
The client logs in with a magic link, follows the project roadmap, signs documents online and finds their invoices. Documents to sign are placed there directly.
- 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 and the right documents. Photos are shrunk on the phone and filed automatically in the client's folder.
- 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 write goes through a dry run first.
- Two-way sync
- Duplicate prevention
- One-click approvals
Interface preview, sample data
Time before the first action on a lead dropped from 216 to 95 hours, 56 % less. Salespeople no longer hunt for who to call back: their Top 3 is waiting for them each morning.
Every month, 67 hours of work are saved and 29 hours of capacity are added. In return, 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, with no typing.
Channel attribution showed that website leads sign 2.3 times more than those from paid social (16.9 % vs 7.2 %). Around CHF 20,000 a year of unprofitable advertising was identified and cut.
The online price estimator draws on 241 real quotes. The first conversation starts from a credible ballpark figure, rather than an "it depends".
Figures measured over one month of operation. No financial or individual data published, client anonymised.
What works, and what we had to fix.
- 01
One alert per event, and nobody reads it
Standard notifications got a response rate below 7 %. We replaced them with a capped daily digest: fewer messages, more action.
- 02
Measure usage, cut what isn't used
A dedicated agent spots the features and automations nobody uses. We remove them rather than pile more on. A simpler system is a better-used system.
- 03
AI suggests, humans approve
Follow-ups and sensitive writes go through an approval click. That's what gave the team confidence, and therefore what got the agents adopted.
- 04
The ERP stays in charge
Replacing the ERP would have put the whole business on hold. Building around it, with strict safeguards, let us move forward block by block.
- 05
Caution with small samples
A first nurturing sequence reached around 17 % click-through on 103 emails. Encouraging, but too few to draw conclusions: we keep measuring before turning it into a rule.
What about you?
How many hours does your team lose 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 building blocks, with a price attached.