SurgiTech Supply boosts sales 41% with Chatref

SurgiTech Supply is a B2B distributor of surgical instruments, diagnostic equipment, patient monitoring systems, and disposable medical supplies, serving over 2,400 hospitals, surgical centers, and clinics across North America. Their catalog spans 8,400+ SKUs from dozens of OEMs, with complex regulatory requirements, sterilization compatibility rules, and contract-specific pricing.

Most buyers are procurement managers and sourcing specialists who arrive with a spec, a compatible device, or an urgent replacement need, and want the same three answers fast: is it in stock, is it certified for our use case, and what is the total cost on our contract.

Before Chatref, pre-sales traffic funneled through a nine-person inside-sales team. A typical qualified inquiry consumed 45 to 90 minutes while reps walked buyers through specifications, FDA clearances, ISO certifications, and sterilization compatibility, then built multi-line quotes by hand. Response times stretched past six hours during peak, and cart abandonment climbed to 68%.

Roughly 40% of rep time went to repetitive questions that did not require human expertise: warranty periods, ISO 13485 status, standard lead times, shipping coverage. The team could not scale by hiring – distribution reps with clinical fluency take months to train, and doubling the team would have cost around 720,000 USD per year.

SurgiTech Supply deployed Chatref on their storefront and customer portal. They trained the agent by pointing Chatref's site scraper at their product catalog, uploading FDA clearance letters, ISO certificates, and compatibility matrices as documents, and connecting their inventory and pricing feed across three distribution centers as a live source.

When a buyer asks a question, Chatref pulls the relevant SKU, certification status, and tier-aware pricing, then returns an answer grounded in their own content with links to the exact catalog page. For bulk quote requests, the agent collects line items, quantities, ship-to, and required date, generates a PDF quote in under two minutes, and hands the full conversation to a named rep so nothing is re-asked.

Escalation rules keep humans in the loop for contract negotiations, large RFQs, custom kits, and anything the agent is not confident about. Chatref's credit-based usage (1 to 5 coins per reply depending on response length) made it easy to forecast cost against actual chat volume, with no seat fees as the sales team grew.

Within 90 days of rollout, sales grew 41% on steady traffic, driven by faster quoting and 24/7 coverage of urgent after-hours orders. The agent now resolves 73% of inbound questions without a human, recovers roughly 95,000 USD per month in abandoned carts, and saves around 51,000 USD per month in support labor. Cart abandonment dropped from 68% to 29%, and CSAT rose from 77% to 91%.

Inside-sales reps report spending more time on complex custom kits and strategic accounts, less time on "do you have ISO 13485" messages. Chatref paid for itself within the first six weeks and kept scaling at PAYG rates.