Alfred

The Slack Side
User Response interface

Inspiration

Inspired by help ticketing systems like Zendesk

What it does

Instead of using an external web application, Alfred uses Slack to communicate between the user and the support personel. Each ticket is essentially a channel, allowing for the use of many different integrations by the support team in the channel. However, the user will only see messages explicitly intended for them. A message is sent from the slack channel to the user by mentioning @alfred in the message

How we built it

We used JavaScript to code the functionality of the bot and HTML for the customer's interface with some CSS

Challenges we ran into

One of the most difficult tasks was adapting to the programming style of Node.JS. The other difficult task was to understand and use the API to communicate with the slack team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

IT WORKS

What we learned

We learned how to successfully implement a simple slack bot as well as how to setup and use Node.JS

What's next for Alfred: Customer Support, with a little more slack

Whats next? Well, the possibilities are honestly endless. Slack offers so many features in its API that we haven't implemented yet, like file sharing.