What an SOP is and why AI needs one

When someone joins a sales team, they rarely get a manual. They learn by watching colleagues. After a few weeks they know that one customer has special terms, that orders for the islands go with a different carrier, and that discounts above a certain amount need the director's sign-off.

AI does not learn that way. It is not in the room, it does not overhear conversations and it knows nothing about your company. To do the work the way your team does it, someone has to tell it how. That is what a procedure is for.

In short: an SOP is a step-by-step description of how your company runs a process. AI needs one to do the work the way your team would, the same way every time, and to know where to stop and ask a person for a decision.

What an SOP is

SOP stands for standard operating procedure, often just called a procedure. It describes the steps of a process: what starts it, where each piece of information comes from, what to do in each case and who decides when a case falls outside the rule.

Many companies have written procedures for quality or audits, kept in a folder nobody opens. The procedures we mean here are different. They describe everyday work, like handling an order or answering a quote request, and they are actually used every time the process runs.

Why AI needs one

A good AI model reads and writes very well. It can make sense of a confusing message, work out which products the customer wants and write a polite reply. But it does not know whether the customer has a special price, what to do when stock runs short, or whether an order below a certain value pays for delivery.

Without a procedure, the AI improvises. Sometimes it gets it right and sometimes it does not, and in a business that is not acceptable. A wrong answer to a customer or an order entered incorrectly costs money and trust.

With a procedure, the AI does what the team would do, in the same order. Every step is logged, so at any moment you can see what was done and why.

When only one person knows how it is done

Writing procedures also solves a problem companies had long before AI.

In most companies, processes and business rules are not written down anywhere. The people who do the work every day are the ones who know them. Often only one or two people know how to do a task from start to finish: which customers have special terms, which carrier is used for each area, what to reply when an item runs out.

While those people are around, everything works. The trouble starts when they are not:

• During holidays, requests wait for whoever knows, or are handled by a colleague who has to guess.
• During sick leave, the same happens, with no end date.
• When someone leaves the company, they take years of rules that nobody ever wrote down with them.
• When someone new joins, they learn only what they manage to see and ask in the first few weeks.

Writing the procedure takes that risk out of the business. The rules stop depending on one person's memory and sit somewhere the whole team can see and correct them. Because Crafteer.ai follows the procedure every time the process runs, the task keeps being done the same way, whoever is on holiday.

An example: an order by WhatsApp

A regular customer sends this message to the company number:

Morning, please send 40 boxes of the blue gloves and 12 of the big degreaser, same as last time. Needed for Thursday.

A procedure for handling WhatsApp orders might look like this:

1. Identify the customer by mobile number, from the contact record. If the number is not linked to any account, ask the team in the chat.
2. Work out which products they are. Customers rarely give the product code: they write the name they use day to day, which is often not the one in the ERP. Match the request against the customer's purchase history and previous orders to find the right codes. Here, “blue gloves” is product 2210 and “big degreaser” is 2215, the 5-litre one, which this customer orders every month. If more than one product could fit, ask the team.
3. Check the ERP: the stock of each product and the price that applies to this customer.
4. If everything is in stock, create a draft order with the requested delivery date.
5. If a product is short, prepare a message for the customer saying what can go now and asking whether they would rather receive a partial delivery or wait for the rest.
6. Prepare the confirmation for the customer, with the quantities and the delivery day.
7. Wait for the team's approval. The order and the message sit in the chat, ready to approve.
8. Once approved, send the order to the ERP and the confirmation to the customer, log everything on the customer's account and update the deal.

From step 1 to step 6, Crafteer.ai works on its own. Step 2 is where the most time is saved: someone who knows the customer knows what “the blue gloves” are, and Crafteer.ai gets there through the purchase history, without anyone having to look it up.

Notice too that the procedure does not try to foresee everything. It says what to do in the normal case and where to stop and ask.

How you write one in Crafteer.ai

In Crafteer.ai, you write a procedure by describing the process in words or by voice, the way you would explain it to a new colleague. The description is organised into steps, which the team can review and correct whenever the process changes.

A few tips that help:

• Start with the most common case. Exceptions can be added later, as they come up.
• Say where the information lives. “The price is the one on the customer's price list in PHC” works better than “check the price”.
• Write down what to do when in doubt. A product that cannot be identified, an unknown customer, an odd quantity. In these cases the best move is nearly always to ask the team.
• Be clear about what waits for a person. In each procedure your company chooses which steps run on their own and which wait for approval, and can change that whenever it likes.

During implementation, the LucidHorizon team writes the first procedures with you, based on real requests from your company.

Where human approval sits

Approval sits wherever your company decides, procedure by procedure. In the example, the team chose to approve the order and the message to the customer before they go out.

Both appear in the chat as a “Waiting on you” card, with the draft ready. Whoever is following the work clicks Approve and send, or Continue in chat to ask for a change, typed or spoken. As soon as someone approves, the order goes to the ERP and the confirmation to the customer. In the time it took to enter one order by hand, you approve several.

When the procedure says to ask the team, for example because two products could fit, the question appears in the same chat.

Frequently asked questions

Is an SOP the same as an automation?

A classic automation follows fixed rules and stops when a case comes up that it did not foresee. A procedure in Crafteer.ai describes the work in words, the way the team does it, and the AI can handle requests written in many different ways, such as an order with no product codes. When it is unsure, it asks the team instead of guessing.

Which processes should I start with?

The ones that repeat many times a week and nearly always follow the same steps: orders, quote requests, stock questions and lead times.

Can the AI send messages to customers without approval?

Only if your company sets it up that way. In each procedure you choose which steps run on their own and which wait for approval.

Further reading

To see how this applies to quote requests, read the guide on answering quote requests by email and WhatsApp. For WhatsApp orders, see the distribution page.