From Inbox Chaos to Structured Service: How Colruyt Group Reclaimed 2,200 Hours with AI

Colruyt Group partnered with Tekst to solve a major bottleneck: thousands of unstructured customer emails were slowing teams and reducing Salesforce adoption. In just one quarter, Tekst’s AI processed 310,000 conversations, saved 2,200 hours of manual work, and transformed inbox chaos into structured, actionable workflows.

Intro

For a company like Colruyt Group, operational efficiency is more than a goal, it’s part of the brand promise. Known for delivering low prices without compromising service, Colruyt has built one of the most respected retail ecosystems in Europe. But as customer interactions grew in complexity and volume, the company discovered that a critical part of its operations was holding back progress: the Messy Inbox.

Across food, non-food, energy, and wholesale services, Colruyt’s teams were spending valuable time reading, classifying, and routing customer emails manually. Despite a robust Salesforce setup, the reality was clear: unstructured communication was slowing down structured work. That’s where Tekst stepped in.

In this case, we explore how Tekst helped Colruyt Group eliminate repetitive work, increase Salesforce adoption, and turn inbox chaos into actionable insights, without changing how people work.

Organisation

Colruyt Group is one of Belgium’s most iconic and diversified retailers. With activities across food, non-food, wholesale, and energy, the group manages thousands of customer interactions every day. It has long been recognized for its operational efficiency and commitment to value. But behind that promise was an unseen challenge in customer operations.

Business Challenge

Despite a modern Salesforce backbone and years of experience managing customer service at scale, Colruyt Group’s frontline teams were increasingly bogged down by one core issue: the inbox. Every day, thousands of customer emails poured into shared inboxes, ranging from product questions, order issues, complaints to administrative requests and spam, a lot of it. Many came via web forms, often incomplete. Others arrived in French, Dutch, or English. 

The problem wasn’t just volume. It was the structure, or lack of it. Human agents had to manually read, classify, route, and respond to nearly every message. This slowed resolution times, frustrated teams, and created inconsistencies in how information entered Salesforce.

What’s more, the messy inbox made it harder to convince teams to work inside Salesforce. When systems are filled with noise, data quality suffers and adoption follows.

Solution

Colruyt partnered with Tekst to tackle the issue at its source: the inbox. Unlike traditional workflow tools, Tekst connects directly to unstructured communication channels and uses process mining to reveal the real-life workflows buried inside them.

Tekst’s first step was to connect to Colruyt’s shared mailboxes and listen. The AI quickly learned to filter out low-priority noise, automatically detect the language of incoming messages, and identify what type of service each request related to: returns, complaints, product availability, or billing.

Tekst also enriched incomplete forms submitted via the website, adding missing data points before routing them to Salesforce. Once inside Salesforce, Tekst auto-classified the cases, assigned them to the right queues, and ensured that only clean, structured data reached service agents.

Results

In just one quarter, Colruyt and Tekst achieved:

• Over 310,000 conversations processed
  
  
• More than 410,000 actions completed
  
  
• 2,200 hours saved in manual triage and case processing
  
  
• 17 AI models deployed across 29 Salesforce integrations
  
  
• Significant improvement in Salesforce adoption thanks to cleaner inbox and structured workflows
  
  

The transformation didn’t just eliminate manual work. It changed how service operations were perceived internally. With inbox noise drastically reduced, teams could work faster, more accurately, and with greater motivation. Most importantly, they began to see Salesforce not as an administrative burden, but as a reliable, structured environment for value-driven service.

As Colruyt Group continues to scale, the Tekst platform is now being prepared to expand across new brands and customer flows. What started as an automation project has evolved into a broader transformation, where inboxes no longer hide chaos, but reveal process clarity and unlock human potential.

Why It Matters

Colruyt’s journey reflects a growing challenge for enterprise organisations: the disconnect between unstructured customer communication and the structured environments they aspire to operate in. By uncovering processes directly from the inbox, Tekst helps close that gap, without changing the tools teams already use.

The result is not just time saved, but a smarter, cleaner, and more human way to work.

About Tekst

Tekst is an AI platform that eliminates repetitive work hidden in unstructured communication flows, starting with the inbox. By connecting directly to shared mailboxes, forms, and ticketing systems, Tekst uncovers how work really happens, automates repetitive tasks, and enriches data before it enters core systems like Salesforce or SAP. The result is structured workflows, cleaner data, faster resolution, and happier teams - without the need for disruptive change management.

Tekst helps enterprise organisations turn chaos into clarity, and boring work into real value.

16 Views 2 Likes Introduce me  Read More