Choice Car, SA is a Salvador Caetano Group company that operates in the mobility of people, in the business areas of: Tourism, Corporate and Events, Digital Platforms, Children and the Elderly with the Bedriven and Rodinhas brands. These two brands together transport more than 1,000,000 people a year, from the most important Portuguese cities, with vehicles available 24 hours a day.

Rodinhas is a service that specialises in the shared transport of children, guaranteeing their safe movement between home, school, birthday parties or other extracurricular activities by certified professionals who specialise in this type of service. This service has a website where customers can submit their requests for quotes. However, there were requests that were submitted via email instead of the platform.

Given the strong demand for this type of service, Rodinhas sales team found it very difficult to manage these requests via email, spending a lot of time manually processing all the data and consequently delaying the response to customer requests.

This led to the need to look for technological solutions that would help respond to all the requests for quotations received via different channels.

Nowadays, efficiency and speed in responding to customers are crucial to success. Choice Car, SA recognised the need to optimise the management of quotation requests for its Rodinhas service.

With the help of DevScope, they implemented an innovative solution to respond to the need to automate the process of processing order information and storing it in the platform’s database.

To do this, DevScope developed a tool capable of reading and interpreting emails, distinguishing whether the email is a request for a quote or contains other information. In cases where the email is not a request for a quote, the sales assistant is shown a message informing them. Once the email has been detected as a request for a quote, the tool proceeds to extract and record the data on the platform.

Once the information is complete, the data is stored in the Rodinhas backoffice and an automatic thank you email is generated, informing the customer that their order will be attended to as soon as possible. If the information is not complete, an automatic email is generated asking the customer for the missing data.

To develop this solution, the Devscope team used an LLM (Azure OpenAI gpt-4o) to extract information from emails and generate replies, Azure CosmosDB to store the information extracted from emails, Azure App Service (Web App) to host the Outlook Add-In, Document Intelligence to read email attachments and Function App to host the information extraction and reply generation functions.

This solution has enabled Choice Car to improve the quote request management process, making it faster and more efficient. By automating part of the process with this new tool, the team has reduced the time spent on this procedure by 76.5%, now being able to read, extract, label and store all the information in an email automatically. The time that used to be spent on this process is now allocated to other resources, significantly improving the time management of Rodinhas’ commercial team.

With the success of automating quotation request management, Rodinhas is now exploring other areas where technology can be applied to continue improving its services and better serving its customers.

“It’s been a pleasure working with Devscope and it’s certainly a relationship that will continue in other projects.”

– Margarida Antelo, Inovation Project Manager, Grupo Salvador Caetano

“(…) our main objective here was to reduce the lead time for each email, (…) with this model we’ve actually realised that we’ve managed to reduce the time it takes to process an email to four minutes (…)”

– Liliana Falcão, Digital Project Manager, Choice Car, Grupo Salvador Caetano

Azure OpenAI

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure App Service

Azure AI Document Intelligence

Azure Functions