Country: India
The Challenge: Three Disconnected Portals and No Single Source of Truth
Coffee & Creative is a creative and advertising agency with over two decades in the business, a team of around 50, and roughly 20 active brand accounts. Their operations ran across three separate legacy portals: one for admins, one for the team, and one for clients. Each had its own login, its own data, and its own gaps.
The day to day pain was familiar to any agency leader:
- Deadlines lived as free text, so nobody could reliably see what was late.
- No measurable view of employee performance beyond gut feel.
- Clients emailed for status updates, approvals happened over WhatsApp screenshots, and invoices were chased manually.
- The data was locked in a structure no reporting tool, and certainly no AI, could read.
The ProMonkey Solution: One Codebase, Three Experiences, Built for AI From Day One
We rebuilt the entire system as a single platform with one login and three role based experiences: Admin, Team, and Client.
For the agency's leadership
- A live command center: overdue work, tasks awaiting clients, outstanding invoices, and a health score per brand, all on one screen.
- A nightly computed performance score for every team member, built from eight transparent parameters such as on time delivery, review pass rate, client approval rate, and EOD discipline, with weights the admin can tune.
- Full audit trail: every change to every task, logged with who, what, and when.
For the team
- Real task flow with proper statuses, deadlines in date and time, and status history on every move.
- End of day logs per task, attendance derived automatically from logins, leave requests, and a private channel to raise workplace concerns.
For clients
- A self service portal where clients see only the work shared with them, in plain language, approve or send back deliverables with notes, raise work requests, and pay invoices online through Razorpay.
- Internal comments, rejection notes, and team details stay internal. Visibility rules are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface.
Built AI ready
The entire schema was designed so an AI agent can read it safely: clean relational structure, a read only database role, named parameterised queries, and a signed token SDK. ProMonkey's Sarthi agent plugs in on top to answer status questions, send daily WhatsApp digests to clients, chase missing EOD logs, and nudge on overdue tasks, all without the CRM itself sending a single message.
Migration Without Losing a Thread
Every brand, user, task, comment, attendance record, and announcement from the old system came across, with legacy IDs preserved for traceability and a migration report verified against the source before go live. Old passwords were never migrated; every user was moved to secure, modern authentication.
The Impact
- Three portals and three logins became one platform, with every role seeing exactly what it should.
- Late work is visible the moment it is late, instead of surfacing in a month end review.
- Employee performance moved from opinion to a transparent, parameter based score the team can see and improve against.
- Clients approve work and pay invoices without a single chase email.
- The agency's operational data is now AI readable, which means status questions, digests, and reminders run on autopilot with human rules behind them.
Tech Stack
Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma, Redis with background job queues, Razorpay payment links and webhooks, Docker on a managed VPS, signed token SDK for AI agent access
FAQ
What makes a CRM "AI ready"?
Clean relational data, strict access scoping, an audit log, and a safe read only interface for agents. We design for this from the schema up, so AI features arrive as a plug in rather than a rebuild.
Did the old data survive the move?
Yes. Every business record was migrated with its history, verified by a counted migration report and spot checks before cutover.
Can this work for other agencies?
Yes. The pattern of role based portals, measurable performance, client self service, and an AI agent layer fits any services business running multiple client accounts.
