Proactive and responsive: how CF Group raised customer satisfaction through its order desk

A demanding context: sharp seasonality and complex flows

CF Group, a specialist in pool equipment, handles tens of thousands of B2B orders every year, with a critical peak between March and July. Before Catalog, the order desk teams faced two problems:

• growing volumes to handle with the same headcount,
• manual data entry that bred errors, delays and internal frustration.

Despite a tool like Salesforce, orders arriving by email stayed outside the automated path.

The goal: free the order desk to strengthen operational performance

The supply leadership's ambition was clear: free up time spent on work with no value, and redirect the teams towards proactive management, logistics coordination and customer satisfaction.

« With Catalog we lose far less time entering orders. Now we can spend more time anticipating what customers need and handling exceptions properly. »

— Mathieu Rognon, Supply Chain Director

A pragmatic rollout, designed for immediate impact

CF Group chose a simple format: CSV files exchanged over SFTP, with no change to customer habits and no upheaval to the existing architecture.

Catalog reads, processes and reformats the orders received by email (PDF, Excel and more) to feed them into the ERP (Dynamics AX). At the other end, the order desk only has to validate.

« Before, you had to fit into the mould of the big, rigid software. With Catalog, we ask, and a few weeks later it is done. »

— Mathieu Rognon

Concrete results from the very first peak season

In the middle of an operational crunch, CF Group kept pace with no compromise on quality

• 100% of the simple trade flow is now handled automatically (25% of orders across all flows).
• 40 orders in 2 hours: a level of productivity that was out of reach before.
• Fewer errors, faster responses, better visibility on the peaks.

The order desk becomes a lever of customer performance

Cutting the manual load allowed the order desk role itself to shift. The team now works on higher-value ground:

• Informed logistics decisions: holding back a partial shipment, grouping orders.
• Commercial recovery: spotting a missing dependent product, calling the customer.
• Heading off disputes and shortages: saving an order before it becomes a problem.

« Some products are completely dependent on each other. If a customer orders one without the other, something has gone wrong. That is where we save the customer. »

Conclusion

CF Group shows that well-targeted automation does not replace people: it frees them.

Far from dehumanising the customer relationship, Catalog let the order desk move up in value, become more strategic, and above all more useful to customers.

A pragmatic transformation, a fast one, and above all one that lands.