Customer-Facing AI Proposal

Extending OX Group's AI leadership to the front line: 24/7 automated service for every region.

Your internal productivity stack is already running. This proposal covers the other half — the customer-facing layer. A Voice AI Receptionist and a Dealer Portal Chat Widget, built once for ANZ and scaled across every region.

Project 01
Voice AI Receptionist
Project 02
Dealer Portal Chat Widget
Prepared for OX Group
By NxtLayr AI
14 May 2026
Your Business

OX Group — a global tool manufacturer already shipping AI in production

OX Group operates across six regions globally, with a centralised global purchasing function and a Philippines support centre. The Australian customer service team, led by Liza Moren, is the proving ground for global customer-service modernisation. This proposal extends an existing AI investment programme that already has live production components.

“We are very passionate about adopting AI in the business. Everyone should be, and we definitely are.”

Ben Truswell · Head of Global Systems & Business Processes

Global Footprint
6markets operated globally
AU · NZ · UK · Europe · US · Canada

Already investing heavily in AI

This proposal extends an existing AI investment programme, not a pioneering experiment. Your team is already shipping live AI capability across these initiatives:

Oxley — Internal Teams Chatbot

In build on Microsoft AI Foundry — internal productivity layer across NetSuite and freight data.

NetSuite AI Order Scanning

Live in production — dealer PDF orders auto-scanned and populated into NetSuite.

Power BI + Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse

Celigo-fed warehouse powering business intelligence and the Oxley brain.

Microsoft Copilot Premium

Deployed to sales managers and CS leadership for drafting and presentation generation.

What We Found

Where customer service time is actually going

The top five call drivers cover roughly 73% of inbound customer service volume. Each one is structured, repetitive, and well-suited to an AI agent that reads from a clean, read-only data layer.

Call drivers by volume

01Request Price & Availability
25.3%

Captured by agent, warm-transferred to a rep — agent never quotes price.

02Follow up on existing order
23.4%

ETA read-back from Celigo-fed order data.

03Transferred to / Looking for person
8.9%

Receptionist pattern with door-keeper logic.

04Product enquiry
8.0%

Mostly end-users — guide to stockist or dealer portal.

05Follow up on a backorder
7.8%

Inbound shipment date lookup against product code.

Five drivers, 73.4% of all inbound calls. Building the agent against these covers the bulk of customer service workload while staying within a tightly scoped data slice.

Operational context

ANZ customer service is a six-person team; three of them take inbound calls. After-hours coverage is currently zero — calls outside business hours bounce off the IVR.

WA customers operate two to three hours behind eastern Australia, meaning the last hours of the trading day in WA may be uncovered by AEST-based staff.

All product, pricing, inventory, customer and order data lives in NetSuite. Celigo is already in place and licensed for data movement.

Existing IVR uses a press-1-press-2 menu structure. Caller experience is functional but unintelligent — no intent detection, no self-serve.

How the agent acts as a filter

From a messy “today” pile to a clean “tomorrow” split

Today
100% of calls → human
Price & Availability25.3%
Order Follow-up23.4%
Transferred / Looking8.9%
Product Enquiry8.0%
Backorder7.8%
Other26.6%
AI
Filter +
Intent
Future state
Split: AI vs Human
AI self-serves~30%
ETA · Backorder · Copy of invoice · Cold caller re-route
AI qualifies + warm-transfers~43%
CS team / Finance / Sales — pre-verified context whispered to rep
Human handles fully~27%
Complex / unknown / non-routine queries
Safety By Design

The agent cannot make up prices, ETAs, or shipment dates. It reads from a read-only data slice in Airtable — populated by Celigo from NetSuite with only the three to five columns each intent needs. If the data isn't in that slice, the agent says so and warm-transfers. No hallucinated prices, no leaked GP, no competitor exploits.

The Shift

Where customer service is today, and where it can be

Today

Current state

  • 100% of calls touched by a human

    Every caller waits in the IVR menu, navigates to the right team, and consumes a CSR's attention even for low-value tasks like an ETA lookup.

  • AEST business hours only

    Calls outside the operational window go to voicemail or bounce. After-hours demand is invisible to the team.

  • Known call drivers, no leverage

    Liza already pulls clean call-driver data from 3CX. The picture is sharp. The constraint is that knowing the drivers doesn't shrink the time spent on them — every ETA, invoice and back-order call still routes through a human.

  • Capacity scales with headcount

    Growth in any region requires hiring an additional CSR in that market.

  • Caller experience frustrating and slow with IVR

    Press-1-press-2 menu navigation costs every caller time before they reach a human. Tradies hate it, end users abandon, and dealers ring back through the front desk.

After deployment

Future state

  • 30% of calls fully self-served

    AI handles the simple ETA, copy-of-invoice, and back-order calls end-to-end, with verification and email confirmation.

  • 24/7 inbound coverage

    After-hours calls are captured, qualified, and either resolved or queued for follow-up. Zero calls bounce.

  • Every call transcribed and scored

    Retell Assure monitors 100% of calls for hallucinations, latency, and resolution quality. Monthly dashboards for Liza.

  • Capacity scales independently of headcount

    Adding a new region adds a Retell minute allocation, not a CSR hire.

  • Consistent caller experience globally

    The same AU female voice, the same handling logic, the same verification flow across all six regions.

Scale without hiring

If OX grows 30% across the next two years, the current operating model requires hiring an additional customer service rep in each region carrying that load. The proposed model absorbs that growth on the same retainer. The agent is a permanent capacity multiplier — once built, every additional dollar of revenue adds zero customer service cost until volume genuinely exceeds the platform's bandwidth.

Proposed Solution

Two projects, one shared data layer

Each project can be approved standalone or together. They share the same data architecture, so deploying both does not double the integration work.

Project 1Voice AI Receptionist

Voice AI Receptionist

Replaces the current 3CX IVR with a conversational AU female voice that detects intent, self-serves the contained drivers, and warm-transfers everything else with full context. Voice and vocabulary localise per region — Australian for ANZ, mid-Atlantic English for UK/Europe, North American for US/Canada, with regional terminology baked in (e.g. "tracking number" for AU/US vs "waybill" for UK trade).

The agent answers every inbound call on the existing 3CX line via a Twilio SIP trunk. It uses a soft, friendly Australian female voice with personality. It identifies the caller's intent in the first 10 seconds, captures verification details (order number plus name or email), reads from a Celigo-fed Airtable data slice with only the columns required for each intent, and routes appropriately. Customer service calls warm-transfer to Liza's team. Finance routes to the accounts extension. Sales rep enquiries go through a door-keeper gate before any mobile transfer. IT and supplier enquiries get diverted to email. Cold callers are politely re-routed to email, never hung up on.

Stack flow
Caller
3CX
Twilio SIP
Retell Agent
MCP Node
Airtable (Celigo-fed)

Intent flows

01Order ETA
23.4%
Greeting
Capture order #
Verify name/email
Read tracking + carrier
Offer email link
02Backorder lookup
7.8%
Greeting
Capture product code
Read next shipment date
Offer SMS reminder
Log to dashboard
03Copy of invoice
~6%
Greeting
Capture order/invoice #
Verify email
Queue to accounts
Promote dealer portal
04Warm transfer (CS / Finance / Sales)
~30%
Intent detect
Department route
Whisper context
Connect call
Log transcript
05Email re-route (IT / Suppliers / Cold)
~8%
Intent detect
Politely decline transfer
Capture details
Send email to right inbox
End on positive note
Project 2Dealer Portal Chat

Dealer Portal Chat Widget with Teams Escalation

An embedded chat agent on the new dealer e-commerce portal. Handles common queries from logged-in dealers, escalates complex cases directly into Microsoft Teams.

An embeddable chat widget sits on the new dealer portal (logged-in dealers only — no public access). The agent reuses the same Celigo-fed Airtable data layer as the voice receptionist, so there is no duplicate integration cost. Common dealer queries get handled in-widget. When escalation is required, the agent fires a webhook through Zapier that posts a card into Liza's Teams channel containing the full chat transcript. A CSR replies inside Teams, and the message relays back into the widget — the dealer's experience stays in the portal, but Liza's team never leaves the tool they already live in.

Stack flow
Dealer Portal
Retell Chat Widget
MCP Node
Airtable
Team Member Handoff →
Zapier
Microsoft Teams
Human-In-The-Loop · how escalation feels to the dealer
Dealer types in widget
On dealer portal
AI tries to resolve
Reads Airtable
Escalation triggered
Zapier → Teams card
CSR replies in Teams
With full chat context
Dealer sees reply in widget
Conversation seamless

The dealer never leaves the chat widget. Liza's CSR never leaves Teams. The handover is invisible from both sides.

Intent flows

01Dealer query — self-serve
Logged-in dealer opens chat
Intent classification
Airtable lookup
Answer in-widget
Conversation closed
02Escalation to Teams
AI hits unknown intent
Triggers Zapier webhook
Teams card posted
CSR replies in Teams
Relayed to widget
Sample Calls

Sample call recordings

Short demo recordings of the agent handling real-shaped scenarios with fake customer data, grouped by the Australian and New Zealand lines. Built specifically so the management team can hear exactly what this sounds like before approving the build.

🇦🇺

Australian calls

AU · 01

Catching a wrong email address

The caller gives an email address with the “.au” left off the end. Layla reads it back, picks up that it’s incomplete, and confirms the correct address before anything is sent.

AU · 02

CEO impersonation attempt

A caller claims to be a senior executive and pushes hard to get information released. Layla stays polite, holds the verification line, and doesn’t cave to the pressure.

🇳🇿

New Zealand calls

NZ · 01

Invoice request & order ETA

A dealer calls to request a copy of an invoice and check where an order is up to. Layla captures the request, looks the order up against the live data layer, and reads back the status and ETA.

NZ · 02

Name already known — collection skipped

The caller’s name is already known at the greeting, so Layla recognises it and skips straight past the name-collection step instead of asking for details it already has.

Investment

Investment

Two projects priced as separate engagements so the management team can approve one, both, or sequence them. All figures ex-GST. OX retains full ownership of every platform.

Voice AI Receptionist

Pilot Build
$22,000+ GST
One-time AU pilot build — 5 conversational flows, integrations, scale testing, UAT, handover, training. 2 weeks post-launch support included.
Optional Retainer
$3,000/mo+ GST
Optional. Kicks in 2 weeks post-launch. Continuous monitoring & QA, maintenance, and monthly tuning.
Per Region (2-5)
$3,500+ GST
Per region 2-5. Configuration work — clone agent, regional Airtable, voice/vocabulary localisation, routing.
Per Region Retainer
+$1,000/mo+ GST
Incremental, optional. Same monitoring + tuning as AU.

Dealer Portal Chat Widget

Pilot Build
$9,000+ GST
Standalone build for one dealer portal. Retell Chat Agent, Teams handoff bridge, escalation logic, widget styling, UAT. 2 weeks post-launch support included.
Optional Retainer
$1,000/mo+ GST
Optional. Kicks in 2 weeks post-launch. Continuous monitoring & QA, maintenance, and monthly tuning.
TBC at scoping

If your new dealer portal is a single multi-region site, this $9,000 covers the global deployment. If each region has its own portal instance, expect a per-region duplication fee of ~$2,000 to install and localise on each. Confirm at kickoff.

Platforms — Owned by OX

OX Group holds the Retell, Twilio, Airtable and Modal accounts directly and pays each platform at its standard published rate. NxtLayr never sits between you and those bills — no markup, no resale. OX owns the accounts, the rates, the data and the residency. For reference, expected platform cost at AU volume is around $600-$900 per month across both projects.

Included With Build

2 weeks of post-launch support are baked into the build fee. Optional retainer kicks in from week 3 onwards. Liza's team validates the agent inside the workflow before any recurring fee starts.

Return on Investment

Capacity for Growth

The objective Ben set is to take the routine, repetitive calls off the customer service team — not to replace it. So the framing here isn't headcount savings. It's capacity returned. A conservative 30% of inbound calls are pure data lookups the agent handles end to end, freeing the team for the work that needs a person and absorbing growth without new hires. Every figure below is built bottom-up from OX's own call-driver report and Australian salary data, and stated conservatively. The optional retainer is excluded from ROI 01-03 and shown separately in ROI 04.

Capacity for growth

Decouple headcount from revenue.

Instead of hiring to keep up with volume, OX Group can decouple headcount from revenue. 30% deflection means your next three years of growth don't require a 30% increase in CSR payroll. The agent absorbs the load.

Concurrency

Every call answered at once.

A three-person team can take three calls at once — a fourth caller waits. The agent answers every call the moment it lands, so the Monday-morning rush is handled the same as a quiet afternoon. No hold queue, no busy signal, no callers lost at peak.

ROI 01 · Voice AI

AU pilot — customer service capacity returned

Build Cost
$22,000
One-off
Capacity Returned
$75,600
0.9 CSR-equivalent / year
Payback
~3.5 months
Inbound Calls Deflected
30%
Handled end to end by AI
Capacity-to-Cost Ratio (Year 1)
Every $1 of build cost returns
3.4x
How the number is built
30% of inbound calls self-served
Order-status (ETA) and backorder lookups are 31.2% of inbound volume in OX's call-driver report. The agent resolves these end to end against the Celigo-fed data layer. Modelled at a conservative 30% net, allowing for calls that still warm-transfer.
30%
0.9 CSR of call-handling capacity
30% across the three reps who take inbound calls = 0.9 full-time-equivalent of call load returned to the team — capacity for growth, not a role removed.
0.9 FTE
Valued at the loaded CSR cost
0.9 FTE × $84,000 fully-loaded AU customer service cost (base salary ~$60-65k per SEEK and PayScale, plus ~40% on-costs). After-hours capture and warm-transfer context are real additional benefits, not priced in here.
$75,600
ROI 02 · Chat Widget

Dealer portal chat standalone

Build Cost
$9,000
One-off
Integration Cost
$0
Reuses the voice data layer
Baseline Data
None yet
No prior portal bot
Illustrative Value
~$8,400
Per 4 hrs/wk absorbed
How to read this one honestly

The dealer-portal chat widget reuses the voice agent's Celigo-fed data layer and the same deflection logic, so there is no duplicate integration cost. OX has not run a portal chat bot before, so there is no query-volume baseline — a precise ROI is sized once the portal has a quarter of live data. Illustratively, every 4 hours per week of dealer queries it absorbs is worth roughly $8,400 a year of CSR capacity at the same $84,000 loaded cost. The firmer case for this build is strategic: it deflects dealer queries on the channel dealers prefer, and supports adoption of the new portal launching this year.

ROI 03 · Combined Program

Five-region voice at scale

Total Build
$45,000
5-region voice + AU chat
Annual Capacity (Floor)
~$378,000
5 × the AU baseline
Per-Region Config
$3,500
Clone, localise, route
Regions
5
ANZ → US → UK + Europe + Canada

The AU pilot proves the unit economics. Each further region is a $3,500 configuration that returns capacity on the same basis. Five regions at the AU baseline is roughly $378,000 a year of customer service capacity against a one-time $45,000 build. We treat this as a conservative floor: ANZ is the smallest of OX's major regions, so the US and UK should carry higher volume. Each regional figure should be validated against that region's own call data before its rollout gate.

ROI 04 · With Retainer

Economics with the optional retainer

The retainer is optional and excluded from ROI 01-03. It is not a maintenance fee for the build — it is what keeps the 30% deflection rate from drifting as call patterns, products and platforms change: continuous monitoring, monthly tuning, edge-case fixes, and handling Retell, Twilio and model updates. The figures below show the picture with it taken.

AU voice — Year 1 with retainer
Capacity returned$75,600
Build (one-off)-$22,000
Retainer (10 months billed)-$30,000
Year 1 net+$23,600
AU voice — Year 2+ steady state
Capacity returned$75,600
Retainer (12 months)-$36,000
Year 2+ net+$39,600
Five-region voice + chat — Year 2+ steady state with retainers
Capacity returned (floor)
~$378k
5 × AU baseline
Total retainers
-$96k
Voice 5 regions + chat
Year 2+ net
+$282k
Recurring, no further build
Why the retainer earns its keep: a voice agent is not set-and-forget. Call drivers shift, products change, and Retell, Twilio and the underlying models all push updates. The retainer keeps someone accountable for the 30% holding — without OX needing an in-house AI engineer. It stays optional, and the first two weeks post-launch are waived while Liza's team validates the agent.

Method · Deflection (30%) is built bottom-up from OX's own call-driver report — order-status and backorder lookups, which together are 31.2% of inbound volume. The loaded AU customer service cost ($84,000) is a base salary of ~$60-65k (SEEK, PayScale) plus ~40% standard on-costs: superannuation, payroll tax, workers compensation and leave. ROI 01 and 03 exclude the optional retainer; ROI 04 folds it in. Five-region figures assume each region replicates the AU baseline — ANZ is the smallest of OX's major regions, so the total is a conservative floor. Validate each region against its own call data at the rollout gate.

Who you're working with

Built by someone who's spent a decade selling to businesses like yours.

Chris Gulotta — Founder, NxtLayr AI

Chris Gulotta

Founder & CEO, NxtLayr AI

I've spent over a decade working with businesses — across sales, operations, and technology — and the one thing that's always been true is this: the businesses that move first win.

Before founding NxtLayr AI, I spent six years in technology — e-commerce and cybersecurity — selling to businesses of every size, sitting inside their operations, and seeing where they were leaving money on the table. The pattern was always the same: too much manual work, too many leads slipping through the cracks, not enough hours in the day.

NxtLayr AI exists because the AI tools that genuinely transform operations weren't reaching the businesses that needed them most — manufacturing, industrial, multi-region distributors, trade-facing companies. The kind of companies where AI can compound across thousands of conversations, orders and customer touchpoints. The kind of company OX Group is.

I work on every engagement personally. The Voice Receptionist build for OX would be designed, scoped, built, scale-tested and handed over by me — not handed off to a junior delivery team. That's deliberate: senior judgement on every routing rule, every escalation path and every line of the agent's script is a different quality bar to a template-driven implementation run by a delivery pool.

10+
Years in business and technology
6
Years inside tech companies
50+
AI solutions deployed
You own everything

Retell account, Twilio account, Airtable workspace, agent JSON — all transferred to OX ownership at handover. No platform lock-in, no markup, no NxtLayr in the middle of your data.

Senior production build

Every flow scale-tested across 50 scenarios via Retell Batch Testing before any live call is taken. Continuous monitoring and QA on 100% of production calls.

Timeline

Build timeline

01

Discovery & architecture sign-off

Week 1

Confirm Airtable schema, validate Celigo data pipe, lock routing extension map, finalise voice direction.

02

Middleware + integration

Weeks 2-3

MCP server built on Modal. Airtable read paths wired with column-level scoping per intent. Twilio SIP trunk configured against a test DID.

03

Agent build

Weeks 4-5

All five conversational flows built in Retell. Voice tuning. Door-keeper logic on rep transfers.

04

Scale testing

Week 6

Retell Batch Testing runs 50 realistic call scenarios. Edge cases logged and addressed before any live call is taken.

05

UAT with Liza's team

Weeks 7-8

Liza, her three inbound reps and the management team review live calls. Iterate on tone, transfer thresholds, escalation logic.

06

Soft launch on test DID

Week 9

Live calls on one test number. Monitored by Liza and NxtLayr. Performance dashboards spun up.

07

Full AU cutover + handover

Week 10

Main 3CX line cuts over. Full handover documentation delivered. Training session with Liza's team. Optional retainer activates from go-live with the 6-week waiver.

Next Steps

What happens next

1

Project confirmation & scope

Voice AI Receptionist, Chat Widget, or both? One email back to confirm scope.

2

50% deposit paid

NxtLayr issues the deposit invoice. Remaining 50% billed on cutover.

3

Project kickoff

AU pilot live within 10 weeks of kickoff. 2 weeks post-launch support included.

@
Email
hello@nxtlayrai.com
📅
Valid Until
28 May 2026
NxtLayr AI · OX Group · 14 May 2026