How Hacot & Co automated the scheduling of its water softener servicing
80% of appointments confirmed with no manual step
Hacot & Co · Water treatment (water softeners) · Micro-business · Mulhouse, France
Figures measured with the client.
The problem
Hacot & Co services and repairs water softeners from Alsace down to Franche-Comté. It is field work: one technician on the road, several thousand clients to keep track of, and an annual service to schedule for each of them. Behind the scenes, everything rested on Manon, who holds the administration, the scheduling of jobs and the client relationship all at once. And all of it was done by hand:
- Entirely manual scheduling: every appointment to be booked, confirmed, then moved again the moment the day shifted.
- Hundreds of reminder texts sent one by one: the whole client list to work through, knowing that missing a single one means a lost appointment and an unhappy client.
- Routes worked out from memory: grouping jobs by area, avoiding impossible drives, absorbing local surprises. A daily feat of mental gymnastics, impossible to hand over to anyone else.
Critical, low-value tasks: they earn nothing, but if nobody does them the business stops.
What it was costing
The price was paid in hours, and above all in headspace:
- A permanent mental load: the fear of a forgotten reminder or a badly placed appointment never quite went away.
- An organisation hanging on one person: all the scheduling lived in Manon’s head, impossible to transfer.
- Hours stolen from growth: every hour spent working through the client list was an hour not spent building the business.
“I was sending reminder texts to the whole client list, hundreds of them. If I miss one, the client is the one who pays for it.”
Manon, Hacot & Co
What we built
A custom application, web and mobile, where the clients themselves fill the schedule without ever breaking the route:
- Online booking: each client picks their slot around the clock from their own account. The team keeps a layer of control, accepting or declining in one click.
- Routes optimised on the map: appointments group themselves automatically by geographic zone, with travel calculated between each job. The first client of the day sets the area, and there is never more than 25 minutes of driving between two softeners.
- Automatic reminders, by SMS and email: immediate confirmation, reminders at 48 hours then 24 hours before the visit, and an annual prompt for the service. No more working through a list by hand.
- A client base segmented by partner: work carried out for Regen Wasser Services and the company’s own activity live in the same application, with strictly separated data.
- A complete rebuild, on our initiative: the first version, put together no-code on Bubble, was rebuilt in full code on PostgreSQL, with AI-assisted development. Ten times faster to produce, and the time saved reinvested in quality: a smoother interface, a faster application, healthier maintenance. The client never had to ask.
Under the hood: Custom application, PostgreSQL, Google Maps Platform, Twilio
The results
Clients moved into the application in spring 2026. Since the new version, the team has measured:
- 80% of appointments confirmed exactly as booked: the slots clients choose respect the route with no adjustment at all. The rest is settled in one click.
- Hundreds of reminder texts automated: the client list is no longer worked through by hand, and the fear of forgetting someone has gone.
- The mental load put down: the real gain, more than the time itself. Every hour freed is immediately reinvested in growing the business.
- A base ready to scale: several thousand clients managed in the application, on an architecture designed to take many more.
“It was smooth: you understood our needs straight away, and you were always responsive. And it is human: we feel comfortable putting all our ideas forward. Looking at the timeline over two years, we are automating an entire business.”
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