Customer research

Before a first call, somebody on your team opens the company’s website and LinkedIn page and writes down what they see. sumwerk can do that part: read the website, with Apify also the LinkedIn company page and up to ten of its people, ask your LLM for a summary with your own prompt, and write one note on the customer’s timeline, plus a few attributes you can filter on. It runs on your keys and your accounts with those providers; sumwerk keeps no keys of its own.

What you need

• An owner or developer of your sumwerk account.
• A key for an OpenAI-compatible LLM: OpenAI itself, or anything that answers /chat/completions at a base URL you can name.
• Optionally an Apify key. Without it sumwerk reads the website itself and skips LinkedIn.

Switching it on

Two places. Account → Integrations connects the providers: the LLM key with its model and base URL, and the Apify key if you have one. Both are checked before they are stored, stored encrypted, and never shown again. Research is on as soon as an LLM is connected. Account → Research then says what a research does: whether the LinkedIn page and the people are read, which job titles count, and the prompt. {website_url} and {website_text} are filled in for every run.

Trying it first

Account → Customer research → Try it: name a customer, optionally a website to read instead of the customer’s, and run it. The result appears on the tab as it would on the timeline, with the time it took. Nothing is written to the customer: no note, no attributes, no event. Change the prompt above and run again until the result is what your team should get; then let the button, the rules and the API do it for real.

Starting a research

• On the customer page: the button Research this company. Everybody on the team may press it.
• By a rule: Account → Automations → New automation, for example when a customer is created, action Research the company. Every new lead then gets its note without anybody clicking. A second rule can react to customer research is done, for example with a task for the owner to read the note before the call.
• Through the API: POST /api/v1/customers/<id>/research starts it (a read-and-write token), GET the same address answers with the latest run, its status and what was found.

One run at a time per customer: a second request while one is running gets the same run back.

What comes out

• One note, Customer research, rewritten on every run so the timeline never fills up with research: website and LinkedIn links, industry, team size, headquarters, founding year, specialties, the “about” text, the people found, and the analysis your prompt asked for.
• The attributes website, linkedin_url, industry, employee_count, headquarters, founded and researched_at on the customer, so the customer list can be narrowed by them.
• An event, customer research is done or customer research failed, for your rules and for Account → Log.

Where the website comes from

The attribute website on the customer, if it is set. Otherwise the domain of the customer’s email address or of one of its people, unless that is a free mail provider like gmail.com. A customer without either cannot be researched, and the run says so.

What it costs and what it sends

Every run makes one call to your LLM and, with Apify, up to four actor runs. What is sent to the LLM is the website’s text and your prompt, nothing from sumwerk’s own data. The website is public; the LinkedIn data comes through Apify under your agreement with them. Switching research off forgets both keys; the notes written so far stay.