From one week to one hour: How a pipeline equipment specialist accelerated Sales coaching with Aircall AI
Setting the scene: Team restructuring
AHS Pipeline Innovation operates in one of the UK's most technical niches: hydrostatic pressure testing for water pipelines. Before new pipelines go into service, they must be tested to strict safety standards. AHS Pipeline Innovation provides the equipment, on-site analysis, and test certification. Around 70-80% of company revenue comes from this fresh testing work.
Until recently, AHS Pipeline Innovation ran a single blended team of customer support and sales representatives. As the business grew, leadership made a deliberate decision to split the function: a dedicated inbound sales team to convert new enquiries, and a separate support team to manage existing customers. This meant starting from scratch, recruiting and training customer service reps with no sales background.
Zoe Thompson oversees marketing, sales, and operational processes. Luke Watkins manages digital systems, data, and AI across the business, including Aircall. Together, they’re responsible for ensuring the tools AHS Pipeline Innovation uses are effective, integrated, and adopted well across teams.
The challenge of manual call reviews
Before Aircall, AHS Pipeline Innovation used a basic cloud phone system. It offered almost nothing beyond taking calls.
Call recordings were stored on an external platform, accessible only to a handful of people. There were no native call summaries. No AI. If a manager wanted to review a call, they had to locate it in a separate system. As a result, recordings were only reviewed when something went wrong.
"We would only really ever listen to the calls if we had to escalate something. Say if there had been a complaint or an error, then the manager would basically find the call and listen to it."
Zoe Thompson, Marketing and Sales Operations
For a new inbound sales team handling highly technical enquiries, this was a real problem. Each new enquiry captured up to 10 specific pieces of technical information before moving to a quote. Reps needed to ask the right questions in the right order, in a precise industry most sales tools were not built for.
Coaching was reactive and slow. If a rep was struggling to explain a concept or missing information on calls, identifying the issue and responding took approximately one week: finding the right call, getting everyone together, and replaying what went wrong.
The CRM situation compounded things. Their previous provider didn’t integrate with HubSpot, so customer interaction history had gaps. When a customer called, reps often had no context. Ticket creation was manual. The database accumulated duplicate entries and mismatched phone numbers.
The turning point: A unified platform
As AHS Pipeline Innovation moved to HubSpot to modernise its CRM, Zoe spotted a gap: phone calls weren’t being logged in the customer timeline. Valuable interaction data was invisible. At the same time, their phone system contract was coming to an end.
Zoe began evaluating alternatives with one non-negotiable requirement: deep integration with HubSpot. Aircall is a HubSpot Premier partner, and is among the highest-rated HubSpot integrations available. After an initial demo, the team was convinced. The onboarding was fast. Within days, AHS Pipeline Innovation was live on Aircall, at a lower price than their previous provider.
The timing proved particularly fortunate. Aircall's AI Assist Pro features launched at almost exactly the same moment the new inbound sales team was being created. There was no awkward transition period. The playbooks, live prompts, and call intelligence were in place from day one.
"It came at the perfect time. I remember thinking, "That's ideal with this new role."
Luke Watkins, Digital Systems, Data and AI Manager
The solution: AI efficiency
AHS Pipeline Innovation deployed AI Assist Pro primarily for the inbound sales team, and started making the most of its features straight away:
Playbooks with live prompts
Zoe built custom playbooks for each call type, using the AI prompt section to coach reps in real time during their calls—guiding follow-up questions and playbook section completion in the moments that matter. Because AHS Pipeline Innovation's enquiries require up to 10 specific data points before quoting, she configured the AI to hold a section open until all required information is gathered, not just when a customer uses a keyword that superficially matches.
"They have a clear structure to follow. They're getting prompted to ask the right questions to build more connections with the customer."
Playbook switching mid-call
Because enquiries often shift direction as the customer clarifies their actual need, reps can switch playbooks mid-call. When they do, the AI retroactively reanalyses the full call against the new playbook, so no context is lost.
Call summaries synced to HubSpot
Summaries are structured according to how each playbook is built, and sync directly to deal and contact records in HubSpot. Reps reviewing an account see the full interaction history without opening Aircall separately.
Full call transparency
Every call is now logged and accessible to the whole team. When a colleague is unavailable, anyone can review the interaction history without asking, searching, or guessing.
AI-automated scorecards
AHS Pipeline Innovation is rolling out custom scorecards with questions specific to their sales process, in particular to assess how reps handle new customer onboarding. The AI evaluates calls automatically. Zoe can also apply any scorecard retrospectively to any past call, allowing her to compare different question framings and refine the evaluation over time.
Faster reviews, real-time coaching, better performance
The speed of the coaching loop improved significantly. Previously, identifying a performance issue and responding took approximately one week. Today, Zoe reviews calls daily and typically has an assessment, supporting resources, and a plan within the same day, often within an hour. That’s a 7x improvement in response time.
"Same day, I'm able to have a plan of action on how to solve that problem going forward."
Customer service reps with no prior sales experience now confidently handle inbound sales calls within three to four months. According to both Zoe and Luke, reaching that level of performance through a traditional training approach would have taken significantly longer and required substantially more manual support.
Post-call admin dropped sharply. Reps no longer take manual notes or maintain separate interaction logs. Summaries are created and synced to HubSpot automatically. When a customer calls back and their usual contact is unavailable, any team member can immediately see the full history and pick up seamlessly.
"It kills any need to track or make notes of interactions. It's all just there. Full transparency."
The team also discovered an unexpected benefit in dispute resolution. When a customer queried what had been communicated during a complex test, the team pulled up every interaction step by step. In one recent example involving hire equipment worth approximately £80,000, they reconstructed exactly what had happened and presented that evidence to the customer quickly and accurately.
Finally, the switch also proved favorable on cost. Aircall came in at a lower price than other considered options, with substantially more capability.
Advice to others: Switch now, not later
Zoe's advice: stop assuming switching will be painful.
"We felt like we were stuck with Horizon because the process of trying to find something better was going to be too much to deal with. It was almost like a sunk cost fallacy."
For companies hesitant to modernise their phone or AI tooling, the AHS Pipeline Innovation experience suggests the barrier is often perception, not reality. Introducing Aircall was fast. Configuring AI tools took minutes. The interface was simple enough that anyone on the team could use it from day one.
"Even configuring the AI, it's so surprisingly simple. It's just a couple of boxes you can type into. But it's amazing what it does."
Looking ahead
AHS Pipeline Innovation plans to complete the rollout of automated scorecards this quarter, with a specific focus on new customer calls. From there, they intend to expand AI Assist Pro to the customer support team and eventually to the field analysts who communicate with on-site teams during live pressure tests.
The flexibility of the playbook and scorecard system is central to their expansion plan. Because AHS Pipeline Innovation can configure any playbook for any call type, they see no reason to limit AI assistance to sales.
"If we find a specific problem reoccurring, we can set something up specifically to target that problem."
AHS Pipeline Innovation is also exploring upcoming Aircall beta features, including a company context layer that trains the AI on business-specific information, and a conversational interface for querying call data. Given how much they have invested in building out their custom prompts and playbooks, both feel like natural extensions of what they have already built.
"We're probably just scratching the surface. In a few months time it'll look so much different."
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