The Challenge
The Edinburgh Boiler Company installs boilers, heatpumps, EV chargers and solar panels across Scotland. With a turnover of over £10m in 2025, and plans to double that in £20m through 2026, their admin team was drowning in repetitive manual tasks - customer responses, qualifying leads for survey appointments, responding to customer questions, updating CRM and job management systems, handling calls from enquiries, and co-ordination of jobs consuming over 120+ hours per week. With over 20,000 workflow executions so far with a success rate of 98%, automated workflows have become an integral part of their business operations.
Chairman Mark Glasgow knew something had to change. "Our team was spending more time getting new leads booked in, we knew that AI had the potential to solve key pain points for our team. We were at risk of losing high-value quality leads as our team couldn't get them booked in fast enough."
Key Pain Points
- Speed to Lead: 30% of boiler survey leads waiting > 1 day to get booked in for an appointment, losing high quality prospecting customers
- Job Management Chaos: Engineers were fully booked - Lead > Survey often > 10 days resulting in lost leads
- Travel Efficiency: Engineers travelling long distances for jobs due to inefficient manual scheduling
- Manual Admin: 500+ hours spent on contacting existing customers
"With our ambitious growth plans through 2026 - we know AI has the potential to help us do it."
The Solution
flowio developed a comprehensive suite of AI-powered automation solutions for The Edinburgh Boiler Company over the last 3 month period. As a strategic AI partner for this brand, flowio currently focuses on engineering advanced workflow capabilities for EBC based on prioritisation across service areas (e.g. Solar, Heat Pump, EV Chargers, Boilers etc.).
Mapping Internal Processes
As a large home services firm specialising across multiple energy and renewable installation areas - the first task was to map out department and automated processes. Our team visited their premises, talked to staff and mapped out lead flows, tasks and data systems. EBC already had low-level automations built through Zapier, Go High Level and ServiceM8. We mapped out their entire automation ecosystem, every trigger, every node to provide a full understanding and map of how automations were working. Utilising our AI Maturity Framework audit - we identified several key quick-wins, improvements to their data pipelines, and internal skills.
CRM Synchronisation
EBC use ServiceM8 for job management, co-ordination of engineers and customer comms, yet they also use Go High Level as a CRM to monitor pipeline deal stages, customer contact information and business intelligence reporting. These two systems didn't speak to each other. A manual repetitive task for the admin team to drag and move pipeline stages ate up a significant volume of admin time, resulting in errors and poor business reporting.
As a solution - flowio developed a custom n8n workflow integrated into the ServiceM8 API and Go High Level API. Every time a job status changed in ServiceM8 this triggered the n8n workflow, the job details then mapped against the pipeline stage for GHL and ServiceM8 category. Our team knew this might result in false positive results - so we also implemented a confidence scoring system using code, and fallback routes. As a result, every job status change within ServiceM8 now maps the job contact to the correct Go High Level pipeline stage.
Engineer Job Efficiency
Scheduling 60 minute slots into a calendar schedule with AI may seem simple - but it's not when you are dealing with engineers who need to travel from one job to the next. We faced this challenge head on by developing a custom microservice for EBC using Google Distance Matrix API within the Google Cloud Project infrastructure.
The microservice ingests the ServiceM8 schedule per engineer, breaks it up into jobs, then uses the Google Distance Matrix API to calculate "Previous Job" -> "Lead" -> "Next Job" using postcodes.
This gave us the travel time from one job to the next to the following job, allowing us to block out high travel distance times and look for alternative slots. The result: 2 extra jobs per engineer per day due to efficient bookings.
As a modular microservice - this tool enabled us to re-use this process for other automations and agents.
SMS Booking Agent
Another key challenge that EBC experienced was responding to high volumes of inbound leads. With significant budgets on Meta Ads and Google Ads, leads were often lost due to weekends, out of hours or failure to follow up quickly. The average lead to response and booking time ranged from a few hours to over a day. flowio's solution involved developing a custom AI SMS agent within Go High Level that could book a boiler install prospect into ServiceM8 instantly.
We utilised Go High Level's native SMS system to ensure that all conversations were kept within the CRM system, automation flows built within Go High Level enabled decision trees and logic rules and passed information back to custom n8n workflows via webhooks. Before a potential lead even receives an SMS message to self-book - the system looks up best availability via the Google Distance Matrix microservice we built - stores and blocks out a set of available times, and then passes this back to our SMS engine. The user is contacted within 2 minutes of submitting a web form, and is able to book their boiler survey direct within 5 minutes of submission. The SMS agent is able to understand the requests from the users, answer basic questions and book jobs directly into ServiceM8 API.
The results: New form submissions are contacted within 2 minutes, and booked in within 5 minutes via a self-book AI system. Improved conversion rates, and leads captured into sales that would otherwise have been lost.
AI Performance Analytics
With observability, session storage and tracing implemented on all of our workflows, flowio wanted to provide EBC with a way of reporting KPI performance from flowio's AI agent solutions. Our team developed a bespoke client dashboard for their internal team visualising key performance metrics from the SMS agent including sent rates, conversion by channel source, successful outcomes and job distance performance. This data is provided in real-time to the client with the ability to view historical and comparison data.
SMS AI Assistant
24/7 instant response to new boiler survey leads. AI assistant pulls the most efficient availability from ServiceM8 and gives users a self-serve booking option - direct into their job management system.
AI Voice Agent
Smart AI voice agent developed for handling outbound calls for boiler service customers, reminders of annual service reviews and direct booking over the phone helping save the team over 500+ hours following up over 4,000 customers annually.
CRM Synchronisation
Intelligent custom n8n CRM automation that synchronises ServiceM8 jobs (job management software) into Go High Level (CRM) with multi-route pipeline stages.
Procurement Agent
Custom RAG based Slack bot that integrates into Xero and supplier sales data. Using natural language, the team is able to uncover supplier overcharges, discounts and savings.
Implementation Timeline
As an ongoing long-term strategic partner for The Edinburgh Boiler Co. - flowio develop multiple systems for this innovative home services brand every month as part of our managed custom n8n development services. Initially engaged to develop an AI voice agent in September 2025 - with a 3 month trial our team now delivers results for EBC in an ongoing partnership due to the success of the initial engagement.
What Made This Different
The Edeinburgh Boiler Company are a unique business in Scotland - they understand the benefit of levelling up their operations and manual tasks with AI-powered workflows. They approached flowio with a unique vision, and our team developed custom business workflow solutions based on the way they work internally. They had already tried some "off-the-shelf" AI platforms - but didn't fit into how they operated. flowio's automation solutions allowed them to free up time, advance capabilities and become a leader in the home services installation space.
Speed to Lead
Being able to respond to leads instantly 24/7 and over weekends has captured additional ROI they would have lost.
Intelligent Distance Routing
Whether a lead has a Glasgow, Fife or Edinburgh postcode, our custom microservice built with Google distance matrix and ServiceM8 data calculates the most efficient availability per engineer, scores efficiency and provides the most efficient availability to the lead.
Lessons & Challenges
As a complex multi-service company - one of the main challenges was to understand the lead flows, current automations and internal processes. For instance, with renewable energy installations there are a number of different questions that need asked such as what kind of property a customer lives in, access, fuel types etc. All of these unique flows per service create complexity when it comes to building out AI-powered and data-based workflows. The ability to visit on-premises at EBC in Dalkeith, Scotland made a huge difference to flowio's ability to deliver scalable systems, and understand their business deeply.
Our unique AI process solutions have helped EBC's team scale. Not every customer wants to talk to an AI agent over the phone or via text - and so through early analysis and conversational feedback, we also implemented unique fallback paths, and ways in which the AI agents could handoff to human agents when needed. This ensured that every customer received a response, and that the agents were able to focus on the most complex queries.
