Automated lead triage for a construction company
Incoming requests triaged by category, routed to the right person and created as tasks — no human reading of every email.
Illustrative example. This case describes a typical scenario for SMBs in the construction sector. It does not correspond to a specific client.
Context
A small construction firm, eight people, receives between 30 and 50 requests a week — quotes, site visit bookings, maintenance, general enquiries. Everything lands in the same commercial inbox. Everything lands in one person's mailbox.
The problem
Three symptoms compounding:
- Urgent requests sitting two or three days without a reply.
- Quotes lost because nobody followed up.
- The person in charge spending half the day forwarding emails internally.
The automation implemented
Triage is now handled by rules, not by a human reading every message:
- Automatic classification of incoming emails into four categories: quote, site visit, maintenance, enquiry.
- Routing to the right person per category — sales, scheduling, technical, general.
- Task creation in a shared board with an automatic deadline based on the request type.
- WhatsApp notification to the responsible person, with a direct link to the task.
- Follow-up alert if no reply lands within the defined deadline.
Typical results
In comparable scenarios, the gains usually look like:
- First-response time dropping from 48h to under 4h.
- Recovering 30% to 50% of the time of the person doing manual triage.
- Zero forgotten requests — everything is visible on the task board.
Typical next steps
After this first automation, two natural moves:
- Connect triage to the CRM for opportunity tracking.
- Automate the initial quote dispatch from templates per type of work.
Triage is the entry point — it doesn't have to be the destination.
