How Komatsu turned their customer service center into a revenue generator with Retool

Retool is now an essential part of our digital foundation, enabling us to modernize faster, innovate with confidence, and scale AI across the organization.

— John Steele, CIO at Komatsu

Komatsu↗ is a global manufacturer and distributor that provides essential earthmoving equipment, technologies and services to the construction, mining, energy, government, waste and quarry industries.

With operations in over 170 countries, Komatsu’s Australian Customer Support Center manages a high volume of customer interactions through emails and phone calls. This presented an opportunity to enhance efficiency and streamline processes—enabling faster agent onboarding, improved customer experiences, and greater potential for upselling.

Enterprise Architect Eric Cheng and his team took this opportunity on, building an agentic application with Retool to automate their workflows. What started off as a side project soon scaled into a major internal effort, with the app projected to save the team over 22,000 hours triaging calls, scoring $8 million in sales, and achieving across-the-board employee satisfaction.

The Agentic Customer Care initiative empowers our KCSC team to respond to customer enquiries with greater confidence, accuracy, and efficiency. By removing manual friction through automation, we’re enabling our people to focus on what matters most delivering a faster, more informed, and more consistent customer experience.

— Lee West, General Manager of Parts at Komatsu

Company overview

Size: 66,000 employees↗

Industry: Construction, forestry, mining, and industrial heavy equipment

Regions: Global

Retool capabilities used: Apps, Workflows, and Agents

Use cases: Automating customer support workflows, outbound sales

An opportunity to streamline complex processes and strengthen customer engagement

Every month, Komatsu Australia's Support Center juggles over 8,000 emails and just as many calls—addressing customer support and service requests, while also pursuing new sales opportunities.

The issues being resolved by Komatsu agents cover an incredibly wide range—anything from order tracking to complex machine diagnostics.

To get the information they needed, they had to sort through dozens of systems and rely on manual and lengthy processes that resulted in an average call handling time (AHT) of over five minutes per call.

Given the high volume of incoming calls and emails and the time required to address each one, agents have limited capacity to engage in proactive customer conversations. As a result, most of their time is spent on issue resolution rather than exploring potential upsell opportunities or building deeper customer relationships.

Komatsu realized that without a fundamental shift in their approach, they risked losing footing in their competitive industrial market. So they decided to act.

Choosing the right foundation

Eric and his team recognized that Komatsu’s Support Center's challenges required more than an off-the-shelf tool. The operation needed to automate lengthy, complex workflows across dozens of systems. Any platform would need to tie everything together while enabling his team to build solutions without waiting on engineering resources.

Komatsu’s initial attempt: Microsoft Copilot

The team explored other solutions, but quickly realized they weren’t designed for the multi-step, hands-off processes Komatsu needed. The company required a platform that could:

• Connect everything seamlessly: Komatsu's systems included APIs, blob storage, RPA bots, and legacy systems without modern interfaces. They needed a central control plane that could tie it all together.
• Build production-ready solutions fast: Not proof-of-concepts or demos, but secure, scalable applications that could handle live customer data.
• Empower non-traditional builders: Eric needed to enable operations staff to build and adapt workflows without waiting on engineering bandwidth.

Realizing they needed another platform, Eric and team widened their search, and that’s when they discovered Retool.

Building a production-ready solution with Retool

With Apps↗, Workflows↗, and Agents↗ working together, Eric and the team had the production-ready building blocks he needed. In just four weeks, they used Retool to build a call center automation solution.

Our AppGen features↗ helped him quickly build an agentic application that automated the long, step-by-step processes that human agents would otherwise have to manually complete. With Retool as a control panel and central MCP service, they single-handedly connected the app with external endpoints, file storage systems, APIs, and retail workflows.

We've got systems with APIs, systems without APIs, files in blob storage, RPA bots—Retool Agents ties all of it together. We register workflows as APIs in Azure API Management and expose them as MCP tools.

— Eric Cheng, Enterprise Architect at Komatsu

Now, Komatsu has a secure, governable system that handles everything from order tracking to machine diagnostics to sourcing backordered parts—all while connecting systems with APIs, systems without APIs, files in blob storage, and RPA bots. Retool's built-in governance and security primitives ensured the application was reliable and secure from day one, operating in Komatsu's own cloud environment.

Revenue up, time saved, and customers satisfied

The team’s solution is poised to have an enormous impact on Komatsu's Australian Support enter—both in hard business metrics and employee/customer happiness.

Saving thousands of hours

Based on pilot testing and projections, Komatsu anticipates significant time savings once the solution goes live in the coming weeks. The system is expected to reduce lead times before order processing and decrease AHT for inbound requests by 30–40%.

With the solution handling routine tasks, Komatsu's human agents are projected to spend just 3 minutes per email (down from 7+ minutes), which would save approximately 4,810 hours of human agent time per year. With an average of 2 minutes per call (down from over 5 minutes), the solution could save 3,552 hours per year on call handling alone. Across the board, Eric estimates potential savings of over 22,000 hours of time annually.

Enabling revenue growth

With Retool, Komatsu will be able to deliver tools and capabilities to their front-line employees that make them more effective in their interactions with customers. By automating repetitive tasks and reducing time spent on manual processes, agents will have more capacity to focus on high-value activities like identifying upsell opportunities and conducting outbound sales—directly contributing to revenue growth and improved customer retention.

It's not just helping us automate work; it's empowering our people to focus on higher-value problem-solving, deepen customer relationships, and turn our call centre into a genuine growth engine.

— John Steele, CIO at Komatsu

Improving customer and employee satisfaction

Of course, all of this is designed to improve the customer experience. Thanks to the team’s efforts, Komatsu has reduced response times and delivered more consistent service—directly driving better sales outcomes.

For employees, the solution cut down on manual and repetitive tasks that caused cognitive strain. Instead, they can enter inputs into the app and have it complete those tedious steps.

Komatsu’s Support Center team even loves watching the AI agent’s playback and logs to track the agent’s performance over time.

The team really liked seeing the agent playback and logs. It’s useful for reviewing runs, scoring outputs, and tracking agent performance over time.

— Eric Cheng, Enterprise Architect at Komatsu

Next on the roadmap: Agent-to-Agent protocol, Access Control Monitoring, and more

Now, Eric and his team are focused on building an AI-driven suite of tools. Their biggest challenge is phasing out existing systems and merging them into Retool—a transition the team believes will pay off in the long-run and set them up to make an even bigger impact.

Today, their app supports OAuth for MCP↗, allowing for authorization-driven workflows.

Soon, it’ll support:

• Agent cancellation, so that humans can support an agent if it behaves incorrectly
• Agent2Agent protocol, so that Komatsu employees can connect agents built on different platforms
• Multimodal input support, so that Komatsu can upload screenshots, PDFs, and images containing structured data
• Access control monitoring, so that IT managers can limit access to agents
• Integration with AWS Connect, enabling seamless connection with their contact center solution

With the launchpad that they built, Komatsu’s team will use Retool to tackle their broader operational problems, including improving the IT helpdesk, smart construction support, and KOMTRAX↗ support (Komatsu’s wireless monitoring system).

Retool has become a true force multiplier for Komatsu Australia—an accelerator for AI, innovation, and operational transformation. By giving our teams, the ability to build production-ready, agentic applications in weeks, we’ve unlocked a new level of speed, capability, and creativity across the business.

— John Steele, CIO at Komatsu

Are you ready to transform how your company operates? Let's talk↗.