The Grout Guy is a leading shower repair and grout replacement specialist. Starting with one man in a van servicing customers in Western Australia, the fast-growing small business now operates in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia.
Manual processes and outdated systems presented a barrier to growth.
The Grout Guy has grown significantly over 18 years, but its systems—starting with a notepad and progressing to several separate technology tools—had become a barrier to future expansion. Manual processes, including a tedious, multi-day process for managing work orders, slowed down service and consumed valuable time that could be spent winning and supporting more customers.
The company also had a high number of dispatchers compared to technicians, reflecting the manual effort involved in scheduling and matching jobs with technicians’ availability and skill sets.
By bringing all our data into one place, Salesforce enables us to do so much more than we could ever do with traditional field service solutions.
Anthony MessinaChief Technology Officer, The Grout Guy
Agentforce helps The Grout Guy deliver proactive, efficient service at scale.
With Salesforce, The Grout Guy has built a tech-driven business that has helped it differentiate itself in the industry and grow market share. Agentforce Field Service is at the centre of its operations, empowering everyone to get work done faster by automating workflows, optimising scheduling, and equipping field technicians to provide proactive, efficient service.
It all starts with a streamlined process that helps the sales team quickly respond to incoming leads, book consultations, and generate quotes. The Grout Guy has made it easy for the sales team to create quotes while on the road. This includes managing discounts and payment terms for different customer types, all via the mobile app. Salesforce also handles the automated follow-ups for customers who don’t accept quotes right away.
“Having made the move to Salesforce, we now have real-time data on our sales team and their conversion ratings. Conversion has increased by over 20% on average, moving from the low 30s to over 50%,” said Anthony Messina, Chief Technology Officer, Grout Guy.
In addition to servicing homeowners, The Grout Guy works with a number of corporate customers, such as real estate agencies and strata managers, who send work orders via PDF. In the past, it could take up to two days to process these manually as the team worked through all inbound emails, delaying response times and creating risk that customers would turn elsewhere.
With Agentforce, The Grout Guy has heavily streamlined this process. An agent now classifies and prioritises inbound cases based on data such as the customer’s problem and location, meaning the team can action the more important items first. Another AI agent handles receipt of work orders and processes them instantly, handling duplicate detection of accounts and contacts while also creating opportunity, work order, and service appointment records. It now takes two minutes to process a work order, 24/7.
Next, The Grout Guy plans to introduce an agent to handle scheduling, which will make the process even more scalable while providing an unparalleled customer experience.
“Agentforce has saved us up over 20 hours a week of manual data entry while also allowing us to better qualify and prioritise opportunities. Phase two, where we turn on agents for scheduling, will take us even further,” said Messina.
Agentforce Field Service boosts efficiency of dispatchers and field technicians.
The Grout Guy has already increased the efficiency of dispatchers by using Agentforce Field Service to automate scheduling and immediately find the right technician for each job, without manual checks for skill set or location. Agentforce also alerts dispatchers to openings in technicians’ schedules so they can fill in any gaps.
These capabilities, combined with the ease of managing resources and work orders in one central place, have helped the dispatch team support a 3x increase in the number of field technicians. The company is now operating with one dispatcher for every 20-25 workers, whereas with its prior systems, it needed one dispatcher for every six to seven workers.
Technicians similarly work more efficiently with Agentforce built directly into the Field Service mobile app. For example, pre-work briefs generated by Agentforce summarise key details of each job and can be narrated to technicians as they travel.
Technicians also use the Field Service mobile app to plan their route, capture images, report on jobs, generate invoices, and take payments on the spot.
Through all of these enhancements, The Grout Guy has increased the number of field technicians from 30 up to 130 in just three years. It is also growing at a rate of 40% year-on-year, with 60% growth targeted for the year ahead.
Data 360 and Agentforce to supercharge productivity and growth.
The Grout Guy continues to transform so that it can serve more customers, more efficiently. With Data 360, it is unifying customer and engagement data to find and nurture new leads and ultimately drive down acquisition costs.
In the future, The Grout Guy is planning to bring in data from Xero to better understand and reconcile technician time and fuel costs against specific jobs. Shopify data and website analytics will also provide a richer customer 360.
Data 360 will also provide Agentforce the context and data it needs to act with accuracy. The Grout Guy’s next AI agent will be its scheduling agent, but there are also plans for knowledge agents too. The company plans to make the agent available via live chat first before expanding to voice. Other future use cases include an AI agent that can quote for jobs based on images and text descriptions.
The Grout Guy has partnered with firms like Servly, FutureFuture, Balo and ProQuest on its transformation journey. Balo's experts were instrumental in helping drive and execute across multiple projects. ProQuest supported the company during implementation, while FutureFuture & Servly have helped drive ongoing improvements and guided the deployment of Data 360 and Agentforce.
One key learning from The Grout Guy’s successful AI adoption was the importance of iteration. After identifying use cases to solve specific business problems, the company started with pilot programs and built agents in phases.
“An iterative deployment is the fastest way to get feedback and improve, and it is even more crucial when rolling out AI. The other thing I would stress is the importance of getting your data right; having a healthy foundation of data already on Salesforce, it was easier for us to get started with Agentforce,” said Messina.
Salesforce provides The Grout Guy with a deeply unified platform that powers its entire business. Every employee uses the platform daily and it integrates with solutions like Xero to streamline sales and service from end-to-end.
Agentforce has amplified the efficiency Salesforce has brought to The Grout Guy’s operations, providing a complete, extensible, and open platform for building and deploying AI agents. Agentforce also integrates seamlessly into existing data and user interfaces to assist with tasks such as filling schedule gaps and generating pre-work briefs.
“We want to continue to provide a fantastic customer experience, but we need to do it efficiently, and that’s where Agentforce comes in. By freeing us up from tasks like data entry and increasing the speed of our response times, it will allow us to elevate the customer journey,” said Messina.
