tadhack

Last weekend I was invited to participate in the TADHack London hackathon which gathers hundreds of developers from around the world to sit down for a 24-hour hack session.

The purpose of this hackathon is to raise awareness for the up-and-coming WebRTC technology (that I’ve been working on for the past 9 months at Voxbone) and to built next-generation telecom application. It is also supported by the Google WebRTC team building with the technology and gives the opportunity to contestants to connect with them and get mentored while hacking.

I walked in the TADHack London hackathon with the only goal in mind to create something using the Voxbone (the company I work for) WebRTC product and Telestax’s Restcomm AMI. I ended up winning a prize and became a “rockstar” for a day, all thanks to these two main technologies I used for this hack.

My idea was to simply be able to pass contextual information from the browser to a phone. However, as my hack was coming along, I realized there was a business case for this and switched to 3rd gear to complete an actual product!

Smart Dispatch

The final idea behind the hack was to build an intelligent click-to-call for webpages (embeddable with a small script) that directs the call to the appropriate sales agent based on context (information taken from the browser). When the call is over, the information (context) gathered from the call is forwarded to the agent’s email/sms along with a link to the voice recording of the call. I called it Smart Dispatch.

How do I get information (context) about the caller? In order to place the call, the client has to log in with LinkedIn and the information on profile is used as the context and sent over the email and sms when the call is over.

How is the call properly dispatched? I created a management platform for the companies embedding the click to call to link their agents to a particular segment pulled from LinkedIn. For example, if the user calling in has ‘Spanish’ as a language (on its LinkedIn profile), then the agent linked to the ‘Spanish’ segment will receive the call. This can be done for country, industry, or even particular companies (for account managers that want to receive calls only from their customers.)

What kind of information is sent to the agent? Well, anything can be passed! I send the full LinkedIn profile info along with the URL the user is looking at, and link to the recording of the call.

Out of this amazing hackathon, I got a real chance to work on a product (and possibly iterate through it), a little bit of fame, and a LOT of new knowledge.

Below are some links with more information about TADHack and Smart Dispatch:

Overall Smart Dispatch is an idea I want to work on and iterate through as I think it could be valuable to sales agents. The next steps are:

  • Make it more modulable and give the possibility to connect this to CRMs
  • Make it more intelligent by providing speech to text analysis on the call recording and add a machine learning engine for sale prediction based on what’s said in the call