OEKOPLAN

Challenge: Customer support bottleneck and the threat of rising personnel costs

Oekoplan's sales team hit a capacity ceiling. Customers daily sent email inquiries requesting price estimates for building energy performance certificates (PENB). Each such message required employees to manually read it, understand specific requirements, navigate a highly complex pricing matrix, and manually draft a response.

This process took an average of 10 to 30 minutes per email. The team spent hours on routine administration instead of focusing on sales and closing deals. The situation reached a point where the company faced a difficult decision: either start losing potential customers due to slow responses, or hire a new person purely for sales support (a sales assistant).

Solution: Deployment of AI Pricing Assistant

Instead of costly new employee recruitment, Oekoplan opted for innovation. The Databy.io team designed and developed an intelligent AI agent based on generative artificial intelligence (Vertex AI / Gemini Pro) in a modern serverless architecture on Google Cloud.

How it works in practice:

• Automatic analysis: Once a new email inquiry arrives, the system automatically reads it, and the AI understands the customer's natural language.
• Price list integration: The artificial intelligence matches parameters with the client's configuration and automatically queries the existing pricing API.
• Draft preparation: The agent immediately generates a human-sounding draft response and saves it directly to the "Drafts" folder in Microsoft 365.
• Salesperson provides direct feedback to the model on how satisfied they are with the response, using "eval".
• The human has the final say: The salesperson simply reads the prepared email, possibly makes minor adjustments (e.g., a greeting), and sends it.

This "human-in-the-loop" approach ensured maximum quality control while eliminating all the heavy and tedious work.

Results: Immediate business impact and ROI within 4 months

The deployment of the AI Pricing Assistant brought immediate and tangible business results:

1. Return on Investment (ROI) in 4 months: Thanks to the combination of saved time and very low operational costs for cloud infrastructure, the entire development investment paid for itself in record time.
2. Saved headcount: The company did not have to hire a new person to assist with sales. The AI agent fully covered the increase in inquiries and resolved the original team's capacity issues.
3. Significant time savings: A process that previously took tens of minutes was reduced to a few seconds – from receiving an email to creating a draft in Microsoft 365 takes on average less than 120 seconds. Salespeople thus saved hours of time per week.
4. Increased conversion rate: Customers who receive an accurate and quick price quote almost immediately are much more likely to order the service than those who wait hours or days for a response.
5. Continuously improving model: thanks to simple evaluations, the model is continuously improving and may, in the future, act without final human approval.

Conclusion: Oekoplan thanks to artificial intelligence, not only optimized its internal processes and saved significant personnel costs but, most importantly, radically improved the customer experience. AI here did not replace people but freed them from robotic tasks so they could focus on what they do best – building customer relationships and business.

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