Custom furniture: draft quote in chat

The workshop made furniture to order: wardrobes, walk-in closets and kitchens fitted to a specific room. Requests came mostly on WhatsApp and from ads, and almost every one opened with a price question. The catch is that an honest estimate depends on dimensions, material, hardware and configuration, and collecting those parameters and calculating everything by hand took the manager up to several days. In that time the client managed to get an answer from a nimbler competitor.

We looked at what a request's path is made of and found two bottlenecks. First: the manager pulled the same intake details out of the client by hand every time, asking ten clarifications in the chat. Second: the price calculation itself was not hard but not fast either, and it was exactly the hot leads that got lost in the queue. In the furniture market clients compare several workshops at once, so whoever gave a clear figure first tended to win the order.

We needed an assistant to take over the pre-sales routine: collect dimensions, material, facade type and hardware step by step and in a human way, then immediately calculate a clear draft estimate from the workshop's price list. The balance mattered: give the client a fast figure without turning it into a promise of an exact price, since the final sum is still confirmed at measurement. And the assistant must never invent materials or amounts that are not in the price list.

We built a WhatsApp assistant that walks the client through a short, clear chain: what the piece is, the opening dimensions, the carcass and facade material, the hardware needed. Along the way it relies on the digitized price list and the workshop's calculation rules and instantly returns a draft estimate with a breakdown of what drives the sum. Interested clients it passes to a manager for an exact calculation and a measurement visit. The tone is calm and advisory, and any figures stay strictly within the price list, with no improvisation.

The project took about a month. First we digitized the price list, materials and calculation rules so the assistant had a firm footing rather than guesses. Then we built the question flow to collect exactly what a draft estimate needs and not tire the client with extras. Separately we boxed the assistant in with hard limits: only items from the price list, no invented prices. We ran it on ad inbound, tuned the wording from real dialogs and rolled it out to the whole request flow.

After launch the assistant handles the initial parameter gathering and issues a draft estimate on almost all inbound itself. The price reply that used to stretch over days now arrives in minutes, and the client gets a clear figure while their interest is still hot. Managers stopped being form-fillers and work only with those already ready for a measurement and a contract. Thanks to the speed, more requests reach the measurement stage, and the pre-sales load has dropped noticeably.