Automating 25 hours of daily admin for AGS Pest Control

The Challenge

AGS Pest Control, part of AGS One, provides specialist services to housing associations, local authorities, and national contracts across the UK. From its Brighton headquarters, the business has scaled an average of 40% year-on-year.

Every customer work order arrived by email. Will Bartlett's operations support team had to extract the data, enter it into AGS's BigChange system, schedule the technician, add the financials, create the contact and site records, and send confirmations.

Around ten minutes per order. Hundreds of orders a day.

As AGS grew, the team kept up by hiring. But manual admin was starting to outpace the team.

The Solution

Will raised the issue with General Manager David "Disco" McMillan. He and the team already had a relationship with the people behind Build Conciege, many of whom has worked at BigChange, another trusted software provider. They watched a Build Concierge demo and, when Build Concierge launched its workflow capability, Disco and his team were early adopters.

Dimitar Endzhov, AGS's Build Concierge super-user, was shown the workflow builder once. He has been building ever since.

When AGS wins a new contract, an internal mobilisation meeting maps out what the workflows need to do. Dimitar typically has the workflows live by the second client visit.

Today, AGS runs around 50 workflows across the business, covering inbound customer contacts, quoting, job booking, invoicing, and increasingly the financial side of operations.

The Concierge Receptionist replaced the external call centre AGS had been paying to handle out-of-hours calls. The AI takes the call, captures the enquiry details from the caller, and emails them straight to the team. Results were so positive that AGS extended it to overflow: when the in-house team is all busy on calls, the receptionist picks up rather than letting the customer ring out. No call goes unanswered.

Inbound enquiries and Priority 1 Faults are then routed automatically, assigned by geography and skill set, with on-call and local management notified by text and email the moment a P1 lands. The team has full visibility of what is happening in the field when it really matters.

The Commercial Impact

Once the operational workflows were live, AGS started automating the financial side too: adding invoiceable line items to jobs, creating sales opportunities, flagging work as ready to invoice.

The commercial impact has been bigger than expected.

On one client alone, AGS's finance team discovered that £21,000 of revenue had been missed over a twelve-month period because completed tasks had to be picked up and invoiced manually, and at volume some slipped through. Those line items are now captured automatically.

On another national contract, AGS hit 100 percent invoicing accuracy in the first month of automation, something the business had never achieved in two years of holding that contract.

And this heightened operational capability has become part of how AGS wins business. Quality scores higher than price on most of the tenders they compete for, and the communication, traceability, and SLA visibility the platform provides is now part of the offer to new clients.

What's Next?

Fully automated payments are next on the roadmap. Beyond that, the ambition is broader.

AGS is going all in on AI: reporting, planning, data interpretation, asset management, and every other manual task the business can take off its team's hands.

Asked what would happen if Build Concierge went down tomorrow and AGS had to go back to manual processes, David's answer was direct: "It would be like going back to the 1970s, except a seven-day working week instead of a three-day working week."

And his advice to other operators on the fence about automation? Two words.

We don't replace your systems. We make them work properly.

Build Concierge is the AI-powered operations and communications platform for service businesses. We turn emails and calls into jobs automatically, unifying email, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Teams, and Slack, and integrating with the systems your team already uses, including BigChange.