Solving for the Order Desk’s Unique Use Cases

While Pepper’s Digital Assistant helps DSRs work smarter in the field, its next act is transforming the order desk. For decades, order desk teams have juggled calls, texts, voicemails, emails, and even photos while manually entering orders into their ERP. Now, Pepper’s Order Agent is bringing that process into one connected, automated flow.

Unlike DSRs, who focus on relationship-building and upselling, the order desk handles high-volume, high-variance communication. Every distributor does it differently, which is why automation has to flex. Whether a customer sends a text, leaves a voicemail, or emails a PDF, Pepper’s automation tools capture, interpret, and route the order to the right workflow without human re-entry.

Pepper for Order Desk Automation

When used by the order desk, Pepper becomes an automation engine that recognizes intent, identifies products, and builds complete orders directly from unstructured messages even when they come from multiple channels.

The result? Speed to order with less (or zero) manual intervention.

Channel Support‍

‍Pepper turns minutes of manual back-and-forth into instant action. Customers can place an order from wherever they are, in whatever format they prefer, and it still lands perfectly formatted in your ERP-ready queue.

Supported channels include:

• Voice – Create a standalone number or integrate into your phone tree, letting customers leave orders by voice.
  
• Text (SMS/MMS) – Pepper parses product names, quantities, and modifiers straight from text.
  
• Email & PDF Attachments – Extracts line items automatically, no retyping required.
• Pictures - Recognizes SKUs, cases, and handwritten notes from photos.

How the Order Desk Uses the Order Agent

The Order Agent gives order desk teams a single interface for reviewing inbound requests sorted, structured, and ready to approve. Each message is parsed into products, quantities, and notes before it ever reaches the ERP.

This allows teams to:

• Handle exceptions without losing speed.
  
• Validate special instructions or substitutions.
  
• Allow end-to-end order processing to live in Pepper, without needing to touch the ERP

Placing Perfect Orders - Without Touching the ERP 

Many distributors hesitate to automate order ingestion because the integration headaches between their ERP can be cumbersome. EDI can be difficult to spin up, not everyone can connect to ERP, and costs associated with automation softwares can make the project ROI-negative. 

Pepper’s Order Agent works as a buffer layer, so your order desk maintains control while Pepper handles the heavy lifting. You approve what flows in, without losing time going between multiple systems.

Order Agent and Order Desk Training: The Human Touch

Automation doesn’t mean removing people; it means empowering them.

Order desk employees can choose to keep the conversation with their customers going over text or call, forwarding only the original order messages into the agent. This is important, as many customers calling in will still want to speak to a human regardless of which automation workflows distributors put into place.

Over time, Pepper will learn each customer’s lingo (they order yellow onions, but really want white ones!) and select the correct items based on their wording. This results in customer service employees maintaining the relationship with the customer, automating order entry, and ensuring the customer gets what they want. 

Furthermore, because our order agent is learning the “tribal knowledge” around what a customer typically orders (and how they ask for it), new CS reps inheriting old accounts becomes a lot easier. Reps can continue to pass in customer orders and Pepper will know what the customer meant - meaning the rep doesn’t have to spend as much time learning each individual customer’s lingo - Pepper does it for you.

Handling Exceptions: Out-of-Stock, Special Order, Catchweight, and More

Automation gets tricky with edge cases. That’s where Pepper shines.

• Out-of-stock items: Pepper prompts for replacements or holds the order for review.
• Special order items: Pepper recognizes special order items and can be configured only to let internal users be able to submit those items 
• Catchweight items (like seafood): Recognizes pricing variations and applies proper handling logic.‍
• Historical ordering and invoices: Pepper cross-references prior orders for context, ensuring the system learns what “normal” looks like for each customer.

Pepper automatically differentiates between order guide items (routine SKUs) and non–order guide items (one-off requests). It learns when to predict, but more importantly - when not to. That means smarter automation without overstepping.

Multichannel + Multilingual

Real-world order desks handle diverse communication styles — across languages, accents, and formats. Pepper’s Order agent engine interprets across them all, enabling multilingual order capture and accent translation to maintain accuracy and inclusivity.

Change Management and the Order Desk

Introducing automation to a team that’s been doing this for decades isn’t just a tech rollout, it’s a change management process. Pepper takes a hands-on approach, partnering with distributors to design pilot workflows, train staff, and scale up only when confidence is high.

Read more about how Brown Foodservice automates hours of manual work for their customer service desk using Pepper's Order Agent.

Pepper doesn’t just “turn on” automation, it helps you operationalize it. The implementation team works side-by-side with your order desk, ensuring the system mirrors your real-world processes and captures the nuance of every customer relationship.