AI Voice Agent& Full CRM Platform
How we replaced a 50-year-old fence company's answering service with an AI voice agent that books appointments 24/7, and built a complete CRM platform that eliminated $1,550/month in vendor costs.
The Client
Colonial Fence Co.
Colonial Fence has been installing fences across Massachusetts and Rhode Island since 1974. With 5 salespeople covering 86 towns across two states, a 5,000+ product catalog, and a peak season that brings in 100+ calls per day, their operation is anything but small.
Behind the scenes, they were running a 20+ year old Windows desktop application, paying $1,550/month across three separate vendors for basic CRM, website, and lead management, and losing calls every time the office was busy or closed.
The Challenge
A perfect storm of operational bottlenecks
Every missed call during peak season was a potential $5,000 to $50,000 job walking away. The tools they had couldn't keep up.
100+ Calls/Day, Many Missed
Peak season brought 100+ daily calls. When staff couldn't answer, calls went to a third party service that took messages but couldn't schedule, answer questions, or route callers.
20+ Year Old Desktop CRM
A WinForms .NET application that only worked on office PCs. Salespeople in the field had zero access to customer data, schedules, or order history.
4 Disconnected Systems
Customer data spread across legacy CRM, Latitude40 scheduling, FreshBooks invoicing, and spreadsheets. Nothing talked to each other.
10-15 Min Per Appointment
Manually checking which salesperson covers which town, finding availability in a separate system, then calling the customer back.
"It looked like a legit appointment. Everything was in there. It did it right."
Ken Brown Jr., Colonial Fence Co.
Interactive Demo
See the Platform in Action
Walk through how Scarlett handles calls, routes to salespeople, and books appointments automatically.
The Solution
Meet Scarlett: the AI voice agent
Scarlett answers every inbound call 24/7, 365 days a year. She's not a chatbot reading scripts. She's a conversational AI agent that handles the full customer journey from first ring to booked appointment.
Natural Conversations
Greets customers, determines intent, collects project details, and handles objections naturally.
Geographic Routing
86 towns mapped across 6 routes. Automatically routes to the right salesperson based on location.
Real-Time Booking
Checks live availability and books appointments on the spot. No callbacks needed.
Smart Transfers
Knows when to hand off to a live person for complex repairs or special situations.
Call Intelligence
Full recording, transcript, sentiment analysis, and AI summary for every call.
24/7/365
Every call answered, day or night, weekday or weekend. Zero missed opportunities.
What happens on every call
Smart Scheduling
Not just a calendar. An intelligent routing engine.
The scheduling system considers geography, capacity, and availability simultaneously. It knows which salesperson covers which towns on which days and schedules accordingly.
Daily Town Assignments
Each salesperson covers specific towns on specific days. Derek covers Franklin/Norfolk area Mon, Wed, Fri and Newton/Wellesley corridor Tue, Thu.
Pre-Built Routes
Groups of towns loaded with one click. Derek's Route 1 covers 14 towns in the Franklin core. Route 3 covers 14 towns in the Boston suburbs.
Drive Time Optimization
Morning appointments near home, afternoon on the way back. Minimizes drive time, maximizes appointments per day.
Capacity Management
Tracks appointments per week per salesperson with soft and hard caps. Overflow automatically routes to the next available person.
Full CRM Platform
One platform for the entire operation
Replaced the legacy Windows application and three separate vendors with a modern, cloud-based system accessible from any device.
Results
Before and after
Key Takeaways
What made this work
Deep domain understanding
We didn't build a generic scheduling tool. We built a system that understands fence industry specifics: minimum footage, service area boundaries, seasonal capacity.
Legacy system respect
Instead of a risky big-bang migration, we built a parallel system that reads from the legacy database without writing to it. Both systems run simultaneously.
Provider flexibility
By abstracting the voice AI layer, we gave Colonial insurance against vendor changes. The AI market moves fast. Being locked in is a business risk.
Iterative feedback loops
A shared Google Sheet where the team logs every scenario Scarlett handles incorrectly. Rules like 'don't say free estimate' became real updates within days.
"Every call gets answered now. Day, night, weekends. We're not losing jobs to voicemail anymore."
Colonial Fence Co.
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