How a 40-year-old engineering firm got a front desk for five businesses

The client

Devji Industries has traded under the DEVJI name for around forty years from the MIDC industrial estate at Shiroli, Kolhapur. It is ISO 9001:2015 certified and runs medium and heavy CNC machining, precision fabrication, and green-sand and shell-sand foundry work producing 3,600 MT a year of gray iron and S.G. iron.

What makes it unusual is the spread. Devji is really five businesses under one roof: construction equipment manufacturing (mast-climbing man and material lifts, cage lifts, gondolas, bar bending machines, centring and shuttering); equipment rental; sugar-plant machinery and spares; steel plant and forging work; and tailor-made project engineering — with the foundry also taking job work for other firms.

Those five lines share almost nothing. A rental customer wants a price and a date. A sugar mill wants a part number, a drawing and a material grade. The order values are three zeros apart. They were being served by the same two phone numbers.

The problem

Devji's stated sales funnel was Enquire → Review → Propose. There was no fourth step. Proposals went out and, unless the customer chased, that was where the process ended — not through carelessness, but because following up was nobody's defined job.

Meanwhile the front door was two owners' mobiles and a landline. Every enquiry, from a trolley on hire to a sugar-mill assembly, landed on the same handset, competed for the same attention, and depended on whoever picked up remembering to route it and to write down the right details. When a call reached an engineer, it often arrived without the part number or the drawing reference that would let them actually quote — so the engineer had to call back and ask, and the cycle stretched by a day.

• Five businesses, one phone queue, with no triage between them — a ₹5,000 (about $60) rental and a ₹50 lakh (about $60,000) assembly arriving on the same handset.
• Enquiries arriving incomplete, missing the technical fields each line needs to quote.
• No follow-up step after a proposal was sent.
• After-hours and landline calls going to voicemail, or nowhere at all.
• Rental bookings — high volume, low value, entirely standard — still consuming an owner's time.

What we built

A triage agent that behaves like a well-briefed receptionist who happens to understand foundry work. It answers on the landline, on the web form, and on the owners' mobiles after hours — in Marathi, Hindi or English.

• Classifies the enquiry into one of the five business lines from how the caller describes it.
• Collects the fields that line's engineer actually needs — part number, drawing, material grade and quantity for sugar spares; equipment type, site, duration and start date for rental; casting drawing, grade, quantity and machining requirement for foundry.
• Reads the details back to confirm before it commits anything.
• Routes by a routing table — requirement to the right person — and sends a structured enquiry summary on WhatsApp, logging it to the CRM.
• Closes standard rental bookings itself: checks the availability sheet, quotes the rate card, books the period and sends terms on WhatsApp.
• Recognises key accounts — the established sugar mills and steel plants — and warm-transfers them straight to a human.
• Follows up every proposal five to seven days later: confirms it arrived, captures questions and the decision date, and books a call with the owner if the answer is warm.

The hard rules matter as much as the capabilities. No pricing on castings, spares or project work — those need a drawing and an engineer's eye — and no delivery commitments. Rental is the one line where the agent is allowed to close, because rental is the one line where the answer is genuinely standard.

How we did it

1. Discovery

   Separate sessions with Atul and Anup. We mapped how a call currently travels, listened to real ones, and worked out — line by line — which questions an engineer must have answered before they can quote.

2. Knowledge & data setup

   The routing table (requirement → person), the rental rate card and availability sheet, the existing key-account list, and the web-form and telephony hooks.

3. Build

   Classification across five lines, a distinct field-capture branch per line, the rental booking flow, the day-5 proposal follow-up, and full call logging.

4. Test

   Fifty-plus role-play calls, weighted towards the hard ones: the mixed enquiry that spans two lines, the caller who doesn't know the part number, the existing customer who expects to be recognised.

5. Shadow mode, then launch

   After-hours and web-form enquiries first, reviewed daily with the owners. Then live inbound, then outbound proposal follow-up once consent and DLT registration were confirmed.

Results