ROOFING ARTIFICIAL ANALYSIS
Oliver Stanley finds out how a building-supplies merchant has turned to artificial intelligence to improve its analytics.
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ussex-based building-supplies merchant Southern Sheeting, has added Invoca, an AI-powered conversation analytics platform, to its marketing technology, using it to bring structure and insight to the hundreds of phone calls its sales teams handle every week.
As Peter Isaacson, CMO at Invoca, says: “Buyer conversations are the richest source of intent data a marketing team has, and most businesses are barely using them. Southern Sheeting is embracing the opportunity to turn every conversation into intelligence that grows the whole business.”
A new source of data Every week, Southern Sheeting handles hundreds of buyer conversations across its three UK depots: two in East Grinstead, West Sussex, and one at Wymeswold, in Leicestershire. Most customers pick up the phone before they buy, but until now the company’s marketing team could only hear one side of those calls from the sales team. The buyer’s side of the conversation was invisible. With Invoca, that visibility opens up.
Head of marketing Jo Morfield explains: “I’ve always been data-led in how I work. Knowing what the website is actually doing for the business, what’s working and what isn’t, that’s always been important to me. You can’t make good decisions without it.”
“The thing we kept coming back to was phone calls. We could see how many came in, but we had no idea what was being said. What were customers asking about? What were they unclear on? Why were they ringing rather than just buying online? That whole side of it was a gap we couldn’t fill with what we had. “When I came across Invoca I could see it would address exactly that. It wasn’t a difficult decision once I understood what it could do, it was more a case of making sure we had the right setup and that the team was brought along with it.”
Southern Sheeting is putting Invoca to work in three ways; surfacing the buyer’s side of the call, closing the loop between marketing spend and revenue by connecting digital investment to the offline sales it actually drives, and future-proofing for AI-driven search functions.
For Southern Sheeting, the buyer conversation 36
what each of those groups is asking and where the friction is helps us communicate better across the board, online and offline.
We’ve already started feeding that back to the sales team and I can see it becoming part of how we train and develop people going forward.”
Integration
Switching providers when the existing system is functional requires a clear internal case. Morfield made that case, and says Invoca’s approach to onboarding made the transition straightforward.
has become a source of intelligence the whole business can use.
Morfield continues: “We’ve only been live a matter of weeks with Invoca, but it’s already doing things that are genuinely useful. We’re getting an AI overview of our sales conversations, which is picking up on patterns and themes, things the website hasn’t covered well enough, questions that keep coming up, areas where customers are clearly a bit lost. “For me, the real value is in how that feeds back into what we do. Every piece of content we create, whether that’s a product page, a help guide, a blog, even a printed brochure, should be answering the questions customers are actually asking. That’s how you build authority. And as AI-driven search becomes more important, that content foundation matters even more. We’re starting to build that now, which I think puts us ahead of where a lot of the industry is.
“Search is changing too. Buyers are increasingly starting with AI tools rather than a traditional Google search, and those tools surface content that gives clear, direct answers to specific questions. If our website is answering the questions our customers are actually asking, in the language they use, we’re in a much better position to show up in those results. The call data gives us a way to know what those questions really are, rather than having to guess. “Already we’re picking up things like product profile identification, product advice and fixing and accessories questions. That tells us something. It means we haven’t been clear enough in those areas and we can go and fix that, on the website, in our sales conversations, wherever it’s needed.
“We work with contractors, retail customers and other merchants, and those conversations are quite different. Having a clearer picture of
“We had face to face conversations with Invoca’s UK team,” says Morfield. “I also met part of the American team online. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a supplier that has been so hands- on in the initial stages. They ran demos and I needed to feel confident about the switch, because the previous system was working. I had to justify why I was looking to change the vendor.
“We’ve had full training, weekly meetings, and we still have ongoing support as we learn the platform. We’ve also worked closely with our sales team on it, the head of sales and our regional commercial revenue manager both now have access too.
“What excites me most is building a library of product-specific conversations: filtering everything mentioned on a specific product, understanding what customers are repeatedly asking, and using that to fill the gaps on our website. Construction is not an industry known for its forward-thinking digital stance. Our work with Invoca is about getting ahead of that curve and making our website a genuinely authoritative source before our competitors do. “It’s not about replacing anybody’s jobs. My team are probably bored of me saying it’s about working smarter, not harder, but I do believe that. AI is a tool. You still need the thinking behind it, the commercial judgement, the human side of it. What it does is take some of the noise away so you can spend your time on the things that actually matter.
“We’re looking at how we use it more broadly across the business, not just in marketing. Construction isn’t an industry that’s always been quick to adopt new technology, but that’s changing. The businesses that get ahead of it now will be in a much stronger position. That’s what we’re aiming for.
“Southern Sheeting’s value has always come from its people - the specialists who handle technical queries, the depot teams, the sales staff who maintain long-term customer relationships. Invoca does not change that. It gives those people better information. The phone call remains central. What the business does with it has changed.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2026
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