A blurry photo on a Friday afternoon
A café owner sends a photo of her electricity bill through your website form with a note: "Our contract ends soon, can you help?" A plumber sends two photos of a gas bill by WhatsApp. A small manufacturer emails a PDF of a multi-page bill. Each is a real enquiry from a business that wants help now.
Your sales team is out on calls. On Monday, someone reads the bills, types the meter numbers and supplier into the CRM and tries to work out when each contract ends. By then, the café owner has also asked two other brokers, and one of them rang her on Friday.
Why small enquiries wait
SME enquiries are frequent and individually small, so they get handled in batches when someone has time. The first step, reading the bill, is manual and slow.
- Enquiries arrive through the website, email, WhatsApp and phone.
- Bills are photos or PDFs in every supplier's layout.
- Key facts, such as meter number, supplier, contract end date and consumption, have to be read and typed.
- Many bills do not show the contract end date, so the enquirer must be asked.
- There is no rule for who picks up which enquiry, so they wait.
Slow replies lose small business clients
Small business owners usually contact several brokers at once and go with whoever gets back first with something useful. A reply on Monday to a Friday enquiry is often too late.
Manual reading also creates errors: a digit missed in a meter number, a gas bill read as electricity, a business that turns out to be domestic. Each error costs another round of messages with someone who is busy running their business.
Intake that reads the bill and routes the enquiry
We build an intake process for bill-led enquiries.
- Enquiries from your website form, email and WhatsApp Business are collected into one queue, with the photos and PDFs attached.
- Each bill is read with a vision model to extract the business name, site address, supplier, meter number, tariff details and consumption where shown.
- The extracted details are checked for format and completeness. If something important is missing, such as the contract end date, the enquirer is sent a short, polite question straight away.
- An enquiry record is created in your CRM with the bill details filled in.
- The enquiry is routed by rules you set, such as by region, business size or fuel, and the assigned person is notified.
- The enquirer gets an acknowledgement saying who will contact them, so they know the enquiry has been seen.
| Step | Manual | Bill intake |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiry arrives | In one of several inboxes | One queue |
| Reading the bill | Typed on Monday | Extracted on arrival |
| Missing details | Asked in a later call | Asked straight away |
| CRM record | Created by hand | Created with details filled in |
| Who picks it up | Whoever gets to it | Routed by your rules |
The intake gets the enquiry ready and in front of the right person. The conversation with the business, and any advice, is your team's.
Enquiries ready to act on
The café owner's photo arrives on Friday afternoon. Within minutes, the enquiry is in the CRM with her supplier, meter and consumption filled in, she has been asked for her contract end date and replied, and the account manager for her area has a notification. He rings her before the end of the day with the details already in front of him.
At the end of the month, you can see how many enquiries came in, from which channel, and how long each waited before contact, which tells you where to put effort.
Are small enquiries going cold?
- SME enquiries arrive as bill photos through several channels.
- Bills are read and typed in batches.
- Replies take a day or more.
- Meter numbers have been typed wrongly.
- Nobody owns new enquiries until someone picks them up.