Industries — Distribution 04

Suppliers

Thousands of SKUs, pricing that varies by account, and stock that moves between warehouses hour by hour. Your dealers have simple questions about all of it, and answering them costs you a department.

Where the money goes

Support is your biggest line item.
Most of it is one question.

"Is it in stock, what does it cost me, and when can I have it?" Asked a thousand times a day, in a hundred different ways.


01 — Inbound calls

It answers every call,
on the first ring, always.

"Do you have 400 of the navy hoodie in XL?" Right now that call waits in a queue, reaches an agent who puts it on hold, and gets an answer four minutes later — if it lands inside business hours at all. After five, it's voicemail and a callback tomorrow.

  • Answers 24 hours a day, in the time it takes to look up the answer — which is no time
  • Reads live stock across every warehouse, that account's price level, and real lead times
  • Knows the caller and their account before they finish the sentence
  • You set the rules: all hours, overflow only when the queue is deep, or never for named accounts
  • Transfers by reason, warm — the person picking up already has the caller, the account and what was said
  • Every call transcribed and filed against the account, so nothing depends on who took it

A caller who asks for a person gets a person. The point isn't to remove your team — it's to stop them spending the day on lookups.

Call · 19:41 · 47 seconds
CallerDealer 2274 · tier 3

“Do you have 400 of the navy heavyweight hood in XL?”

Dallas180
Reno240
Atlanta0 · restock 12 Sep
Their price$11.40
Answered in2.1 seconds

Split across two warehouses covers it. Offered to place the order; transferred to a rep when the dealer asked about payment terms.


02 — Inbound email

The queue that
never empties.

Stock checks, price confirmations, lead times, order status, tracking numbers, returns. Each one is a two-minute lookup and a two-line reply, and there are hundreds a day. Your reply time is measured in hours because a person has to touch every single one.

  • The same brain as the phone, so the answer is identical whichever way a dealer asks
  • Stock, pricing, lead time, order status and tracking answered from live systems, not a knowledge base someone has to maintain
  • Replies in your voice, with your signature, from your address
  • Anything with a decision in it — a claim, a credit, an exception — escalates to a person with the context attached
  • Threads file themselves against the account, so history isn't trapped in one agent's mailbox
  • You choose how much rope it gets: draft-only, auto-send the routine, or fully autonomous
Support queue · today
Stock checksanswered from live inventory412 auto
Price confirmationsaccount tier applied188 auto
Order status & trackingread from the order record246 auto
Claims & creditsdecision required31 to a human
877
Handled
96%
No human
2m
Median reply
24/7
Cover

03 — Product knowledge

Nobody knows
forty thousand SKUs.

A new support hire takes months before they can answer without looking something up, and even your best people can't hold the whole catalogue. So every question becomes a database check, and the quality of the answer depends on who happened to pick up.

  • Every SKU, colourway, size run, spec, substitution and discontinuation known in full — not summarised
  • Live inventory by warehouse, including inbound and allocated, rather than a nightly snapshot
  • Account-specific pricing applied automatically — tier, contract, volume commitment and the historical exceptions
  • "What's close to this but cheaper?" answered with real alternatives from your own catalogue
  • Your newest hire answers exactly as well as your most experienced one, from day one

This is what makes the phone and the email work. An agent that can't see live stock is just a chatbot with a nicer voice.

SKU 4471-NVY-XL · live
On hand420 across 2 DCs
Allocated96
Available324
Inbound600 · 12 Sep
Tier 3 price$11.40
Nearest alternative4468-NVY · $10.15 · 1,200 available
StatusDiscontinuing Q1

04 — Order entry

Order entry is
a data-entry department.

A PDF from one dealer, a spreadsheet from another, an email body from a third and a portal export from a fourth. All of it typed in by hand at the busiest hour, and every keystroke is a chance to ship the wrong colour.

  • Purchase orders read from any format — PDF, spreadsheet, portal export, scan or photograph
  • Size-and-colour matrices read as a grid, not flattened into a total
  • Lines matched to your catalogue with that dealer's tier applied
  • Short lines flagged for allocation rather than silently backordered
  • Order entry becomes a review step — confirm nine lines, decide on one
Inbound PO · dealer 2274
Heavyweight tee · NavyMatched · tier 3 pricing1,200
S / M / L / XL180 / 420 / 400 / 200
Fleece hood · CharcoalShort in XL across all DCsAllocate
Line total$14,388.00
Needs review1 of 9 lines

05 — Dealer self-service

The best support ticket
is the one never raised.

A large share of your volume is dealers asking for something they could have looked up — stock, an invoice copy, a tracking number, last month's order. They call because calling is easier than whatever portal you gave them.

  • A dealer portal for stock checks, ordering, reorders, invoices and tracking
  • Catalogue data your dealers' own systems can actually consume
  • Proactive notifications — shipped, backordered, restocked — so they stop asking
  • Reorder prompts when a dealer's usual cycle comes round
  • Everything the portal shows is the same live data the agents answer from
Contact volume · before and after
Stock checks
Order status
Invoices
Claims

Lookups collapse. Claims barely move — those are judgement calls, and they should still reach a person.


06 — Market intelligence

You see your own numbers.
Not the market's.

You know what you sold. You don't know what the channel asked for and couldn't get, which colourways are accelerating this season, or how your lead times compare to the people you compete with. That gap is where buying decisions get made on instinct.

  • Built from the transactions themselves — the enquiries, quotes and orders moving through the network, not a survey circulated after the fact
  • Demand you never see: what dealers asked for, specified, and didn't end up buying
  • Category and colourway movement across the season, ahead of it reaching your own order book
  • Benchmarks on lead time, fill rate and reply time against the wider market
  • Reported as market movement, never as a named company's figures — nobody sees what any individual business did

Nobody else can build this. It comes from sitting inside the transaction — the question, the quote, the order — instead of counting shipments months after they happened. InkIQ Intelligence →

Channel demand · this season
Heavyweight
Fleece
Performance
Lightweight
+31%
Fleece enquiries
18%
Asked, no stock
4.1d
Your lead time
5.6d
Market median

Market-level movement. No individual company's figures are ever shown.


07 — Ask it anything

The one you actually
talk to.

The other agents work the phones and the queue. Reggie sits in a panel beside whatever you're doing, knows how the software works and can query your live data — so the answer is about your business, not a help article. And it doesn't just answer: it does things.

  • Ask about your own numbers in plain English and get the answer, not a report to go build
  • Ask how something in InkIQ works and get the answer for your setup, not generic documentation
  • Tell it to do the job — pull the list, draft the notice, create the task
  • Send it a screenshot when something looks wrong and it will tell you what it's looking at
  • Anything that reaches a dealer or changes a record sits behind a confirmation, and every action is logged
  • Chat history is kept, so the thread you had last month is still there

It also writes the brief that lands in your inbox each morning — in plain English, in the format you asked for.

Reggie · this morning

“Which SKUs did dealers ask for most often last month that we couldn't fill?”

Fleece hood · navy XL88 requests
Heavyweight tee · sand61 requests
Performance polo · 2XL44 requests

“Draft a restock notice to every dealer who asked for the navy hood.”

DraftedReady to review
SendsNeeds your confirmation

Nothing reaches a dealer without a click. Every action it takes is written to the audit log.


The roster

A support floor that
doesn't go home.

Plugged into the catalogue, pricing and inventory systems you already run. Nothing migrates.

Agent

Voice

Answers every call, day or night, from live stock and account pricing. Transfers warm when a human is genuinely needed.

Agent

Customer Service

Works the email queue with the same brain and the same answers, and escalates anything with a decision in it.

Agent

PO Processing

Reads dealer purchase orders in any format and turns them into confirmed orders, flagging shorts for allocation.

Agent

Sales

Prompts reorders, surfaces dealers going quiet, and runs campaigns aimed at a segment rather than the whole list.

Agent

Reggie

The one you talk to. Answers questions about your own data and carries out tasks behind a confirmation.

You keep the systems you already run.

We wire the agents into your catalogue, pricing and inventory, and they answer from live data. Your systems stay the system of record. Every build is mapped to the stack in front of us, so it starts with a scoping conversation rather than a signup.

Talk about your stack

Watch it do the job.

Send us one real enquiry — the email, the purchase order, the artwork, the messy bits — and we'll run it through the agents in the first ten minutes of the call. That's a faster argument than anything we could write here.