The situation
Precision Glassworks is a UK balustrade specialist making glass panels, stainless steel railings, and decking surrounds for residential and light-commercial customers. Enquiries come in steadily through the website, so the pipeline was healthy. The shape of it was wrong.
The existing flow was a questionnaire. Customers described what they wanted, submitted the form, and waited. Someone on the team then worked through the queue to price each one up and send a quote back. No price was ever shown on the day.
Two things were going wrong with that. The obvious one was delay. Customers ready to spend today do not wait days. They click on to the next installer. The less obvious one was bill shock. Lengths of imported glass with bespoke stainless steel fittings are not cheap, and the number many customers had in their head was nothing like the real price. Deals died at the final hurdle, after the team had already put hours into estimating, and nobody's time had been well spent.
On top of that, the competitor every balustrade installer is watching had put a configurator online. Customers could design their own balustrade on screen, see a price in real time, and only pick up the phone when they knew roughly what they were committing to. The playing field had shifted and Precision Glassworks could feel it in the conversion rate.
What we did
We split the work in two.
The first piece was the unglamorous plumbing: lead capture across the website, email, WhatsApp, and social, routed straight into the CRM with the right tags, priority, and follow-up task attached. Before this, enquiries arrived through four different channels and got re-keyed by hand when they got there at all. Now they do not. The early read on that piece alone is recovered pipeline worth around £10,000 a month that was leaking through the gaps.
The second piece, and the one Oliver was most excited about, is the configurator. Customers design their own balustrade in the browser, picking length, material, panel style, fittings, and finishes, and see a live price that reflects current costs on imported glass and steel. When they hit submit, the full spec, price, and lead details land in the CRM as a qualified opportunity. The sales conversation starts with scope and budget already agreed. No more bill shock. No more estimating hours spent on deals that were never going to close.
The result
Leads now arrive in the CRM fully qualified, routed, and tagged, and the team focuses follow-up time on the enquiries most likely to close. The configurator rolls out shortly and is expected to compress time-to-price from days to seconds, giving customers the self-service experience the competition has trained them to expect.
When we asked Oliver Dolman, Precision Glassworks' managing director, what has changed for the business, he said this. "Our customers compare us against installers who put a price on screen in ten seconds, and if we need a day or two we have lost them before the phone rings. The configurator closes that gap, and the CRM automation behind it has already plugged a ten-grand-a-month hole in the pipeline."