From Inbox Chaos to Structured, Ready-to-Price RFQs — Automatically

The Challenge

What They Were Dealing With

The sell-side quoting process was drowning in unstructured email. RFQ emails arrived from customers in every conceivable format — free-text emails, PDF attachments, Excel rate request templates, forwarded chains with critical details buried three replies deep, and even scanned handwritten notes. Each RFQ required a different set of fields depending on mode (ocean FCL, LCL, air, road), trade lane, and commodity type, but customers rarely provided complete information upfront. Sales representatives spent an average of 45 minutes per RFQ just parsing the email, identifying what shipment details were present, determining what was missing, and composing clarification emails back to the customer. The back-and-forth clarification cycle typically added 2–4 hours to quote turnaround, with some RFQs bouncing back and forth for days before all required fields were captured. During this time, the RFQ sat in a personal inbox with no visibility to the wider team — if the rep was out sick or on leave, the RFQ simply stalled. There was no standardised intake format, no tracking of clarification status, and no way to measure how long each stage of the quoting process actually took. The result: slow quote turnaround, inconsistent win rates, and a sales team that spent more time on email administration than on actual pricing and customer relationships.