"Quoting" sounds like one task, but it's rarely built that way in practice. It's usually four: taking in the request, working out a price, turning that into something that reads well, and sending it — followed, if you're honest, by chasing it up two weeks later. Each of those four has a different amount of judgement in it, and only one is genuinely slow because it's hard rather than because it's manual.
Split it before you automate it
- Taking in the request. Mechanical — usually a form or an email being read and re-typed somewhere else. A strong candidate for full automation.
- Pricing it. This is where the judgement usually sits, for anything that isn't a fixed catalogue price. Worth automating only for the standard cases, with anything unusual routed to a person.
- Formatting and sending. Mechanical — turning numbers into a document a customer can read, and getting it to them. A strong candidate for full automation.
- Following up. Mechanical in structure (send a reminder after three days) even though it feels like a judgement call to actually do it.
The failure mode is automating the whole thing at once, including the pricing judgement, because it's the only part anyone thinks about when they picture "automated quoting." That's the one part most businesses still want a person looking at.
A shape that actually works
- 1Requests land in one place automatically, instead of scattered across email, forms and phone messages.
- 2Standard, catalogue-priced requests get quoted and sent without anyone touching them.
- 3Anything outside the standard pattern — unusual size, a discount, a first-time customer — gets flagged to a person instead of guessed at.
- 4Quotes that go quiet for a set number of days get a follow-up automatically, so chasing stops depending on someone remembering to do it.
That gets most of the hours back — the retyping, the formatting, the forgotten follow-up — while leaving the pricing decision with whoever's actually good at it. The part that's slow because it's genuinely hard stays a person's job. It was never the part costing you the most time.