Twenty tools, one platform, five weeks

The setup

Almost every week the same ticket arrived. A missing mandate. A quote nobody signed. A workflow that did not fire. Each one meant four or five emails between the back office, the account manager and the contractor, and none of them ever fixed the cause.

The cause was the tool. The team was running renovation dossiers through a CRM built for sales pipelines. One value per field, no message threads, no way to attach a comment to a document, no way for the contractor to reply. The four free-text fields they used were overwritten with every new message. More CRM training would not have changed that.

What we did

We stopped asking the CRM to be something it is not, and built the back office its own platform on the same database the contractor portal already used. One record per dossier, one source of truth, no synchronisation because there was nothing left to synchronise.

Phase one, four weeks: the dossier view, messaging tied to a specific document, re-upload of the one file that was wrong. That alone closed around eighty percent of the open tickets. Phase two moved status changes into the new tool, which ended double entry. Phase three, one week: we switched the CRM sync off and watched nothing break.

On the way we re-architected the signature flow instead of re-platforming it. Documents now go out in predefined blocks that adapt to the type of dossier, sent as one batch, prefilled from the record. Reminders escalate on their own. The platform chases the partner, not the handler.