Before
Every order lived in someone's phone.
This is what a quote looked like before Eva — not for lack of effort, but because answering fast competed with shipping, order entry and collections:
- 1A customer messages a salesperson's WhatsApp asking for a price.
- 2The quote waits until that salesperson has free hands.
- 3Follow-up depends on someone remembering.
- 4Nobody else sees the conversation: if the salesperson is out, so is the order.
Why it wasn't trivial
Quoting steel is not answering a message.
Automating this flow has a reputation for being impossible, for good reasons:
- "I need steel" isn't enough to quote: product, size, gauge and quantity are missing — and getting them was a back-and-forth conversation.
- Prices aren't fixed: every quote carries validity and terms, and yesterday's may no longer hold today.
- The catalog is large and technical: answers must come from verified data, not from anyone's memory.