What changes with each path.
A distributor that wants to answer better has several paths, and three of them are not Peaking. This page says what each one solves well and what stays exactly the same.
The question is not which tool to buy.
It is what happens to a request between the moment it arrives and the moment somebody can answer it completely. Every path below shortens some part of that. They do not shorten the same part.
Worth saying plainly: for some distributors the honest answer is one of the other three. If your catalog is a few hundred items and one person knows all of it, you do not have the problem this solves.
What each one solves, and what stays the same.
Solves: nothing new to buy, nothing to change, no risk. Stays the same: the answer still waits on two people, the after hours request is still decided by whoever answered first, and the knowledge still walks out at five.
Solves: more hands on the counter, real capacity today. Stays the same: a year before they are useful, the same year spent asking your best two people, and the same dependency when they leave.
Solves: customers who already know the part number can self serve, and those orders stop consuming your counter. Stays the same: the customer who does not know the part number, which is most of them, still writes to a person.
Solves: routing, hours, basic questions. Stays the same: it does not know your catalog, so the moment the question is technical it hands off to the same person it always did.
The same team, a different ceiling.
Capacity is however many requests your best people can read in a day.
Capacity stops being the constraint, and your best people work on what needs judgment.
The knowledge is in two heads and undocumented.
It is written down for the first time, and it stays yours.
The after hours request is decided by whoever answered first.
You are whoever answered first.
What you could not fill leaves no record.
It gets counted, by line and by account.
Three of these paths are legitimate answers.
Which one is right depends on the size of your catalog and on how much of the answer lives in a head. If it is not much, do not buy this.
What none of the others hold.
Four things that only change when the judgment itself is doing the answering.
Product, price, availability and the document that backs it, in one reply.
Including the hours when nobody is in the building.
The quote and the order end up in your system, not in a thread.
The judgment stays available when the person who has it does not.
The questions that always come up.
How is this different from a chatbot?
A chatbot handles the conversation. The hard part in distribution is not the conversation, it is deciding which of forty thousand items answers the request, and being right. That is the part this does.
We already have a portal. Is that not the same thing?
A portal serves the customer who already knows what they want. Most industrial requests do not arrive that way: they arrive as an application, a photo or a description. Those still reach a person.
What if we just hire more people?
That works and it is a real option. The cost is the year it takes to make a counter person useful, and the fact that the dependency comes back when they leave.
When is the honest answer no?
When your catalog is small enough that one person knows all of it, when your requests already arrive as part numbers, or when nobody can spare the time to capture the judgment. We would rather say that up front.
What is behind each claim.
You've got this.
Peaking shows up to the session already working with your own catalog, so you see it on your part numbers instead of on an example.