askr | Devpost

In Brief

Askr is a system that allows a company to manage and reply to customer support queries received via text. The system uses sentiment analysis and number information to prioritise and highlight incoming messages in a web ui.

The Mission

Poorly managed Customer Support is bad for business

Call centres are costly and scale linearly, one representative can be on the phone to exactly one customer at one time

Customers hate phoning companies

90% of customers cite long call times as their biggest frustration
45% said offering better service options via mobile would make a difference in their decision to switch.

Given that neither end of the phone line wants to be there, this was a problem we needed to solve.

The Technology

For the user, ease of use was paramount, ideally:

Nothing to download
Something they already know how to do Clearly, text messaging is the obvious choice.

Technology light customer side, technology heavy company side.

One list of incoming queries seen by multiple representatives: open so problems are shared
Sentiment Analysis: Highlights unhappy users as a priority to remedy
Nexmo Number Information: network-availability gives an indication of customer response time; number validity flags requests from fake numbers, and network-provider highlights potential sales opportunities.

A techni

NB: All statistics came from this survey by Accenture last year: http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/global-consumer-pulse-research/Pages/home.aspx