Turning a busy inbox into a sales desk.
We built an AI sales assistant for Taplink, our own smart business card product. It reads every enquiry, drafts the reply, prices the order from the real price list and attaches a quote, and the owner approves every email before it goes out.
The problem
Taplink sells digital business cards and Google review stands to South African businesses. Enquiries arrive through a shared mailbox, the website contact form and paid Google Ads.
Every one of them landed on the owner. Each needed reading, a question back about team size, a price worked out from the price list, and a reply written by hand. On a busy day, replies slipped to the next day, and a slow reply is often a lost sale.
The owner also could not answer a simple question with confidence: is the advertising bringing in more money than it costs?
Taplink is the storefront for BusinessLink, our own digital business card platform. The sales assistant runs inside the BusinessLink portal.
What we built
An assistant that does the groundwork on every enquiry, inside Taplink's own admin portal. It works in four steps.
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1. It collects every enquiry in one place
Emails, contact form submissions and website chats are grouped into one conversation per customer.
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2. It drafts the reply
It answers what was asked, asks for what is missing, and attaches the brochure or product photos where they help.
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3. It prices the order and attaches a quote
Once it knows the product and quantity, it prepares a numbered PDF quote from the real price list, including the first year of hosting and delivery.
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4. The owner approves
Each draft waits on an approval screen with its quote and attachments in view. The owner sends it as it stands, edits it first, or rejects it.
A chat on the Taplink website answers visitors straight away, at any hour. It gives real prices, and once a visitor is ready it asks for their details so that a quote can follow.
A reports screen shows, month by month, income from won orders against what was spent on advertising, AI usage, stock, printing and delivery. Won sales are also sent back to Google Ads, so the advertising learns which clicks become customers.
The safeguards
Most business owners are wary of AI speaking to their customers, and they are right to be. We designed this so that the owner stays in charge.
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No email leaves without approval
The assistant can draft, but it has no way to send.
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The AI never sets a price
Every figure comes from the business's own price list through ordinary code, so it cannot invent a discount or a special deal. A discount request is passed to the owner.
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The website chat is held to its prices
It is the one place where the AI answers a person directly, so any rand amount it writes is checked against the calculated price before the visitor sees it. A reply that fails the check is never shown.
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Costs are capped
The chat stops answering and offers a contact form once it reaches its daily spending limit, set at R30 a day for Taplink. Limits per visitor stop one person or a bot from running up the bill.
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Every lead reaches the owner
If a draft cannot be written, or a visitor leaves only a phone number, the owner is emailed.
Built for South Africa
The assistant works in rand and prices including VAT, and its reports show figures excluding VAT where that matters. It knows that Taplink delivers inside South Africa only, and that one delivery fee covers one address.
It was designed with POPIA in mind. Website visitors give consent before leaving their details, typed contact details are removed from chats that never become enquiries, and old conversations are deleted on a schedule. The privacy policy explains all of this in plain language.
The system runs on a dedicated server in a South African data centre.
Results so far
The assistant went live in stages through November 2026, so it is too early for honest numbers. We will update this page after the first two months with:
- how quickly enquiries are answered, before and after;
- how many chat visitors leave their details;
- how many quotes are sent and won;
- what the AI costs each month against the income it helps bring in.
One early example: a company asked for 22 Google review stands, more than the published price list covers. We added a rule the same day that larger orders take the top price tier, and the customer had a formal quote by the next email.
Could this work for your business?
It suits a business that:
- gets enquiries by email and through a website form, often from Google Ads;
- sells products or services with a price list that can be written down, even with tiers and extras;
- quotes orders worth a few thousand rand or more;
- has an owner or small team who are the bottleneck in replying.
Installers, printers and signage companies, corporate gifting suppliers, training providers, venues and specialist B2B suppliers are good examples. Each assistant is set up around your own products, prices and way of writing.