Bonsai

Inspiration

We were inspired at the opportunity that the customer support industry provides us. The industry at a large is stuck in a prehistoric era in which technology has stayed stagnant. Additionally, one of our close friends was actually a customer service agent and he mentioned to us how he spends most of his time looking for answers and we know we can push our selves into solving this unnecessary issue.

What it does

Introducing Bonsai, an intelligent customer support tool. Bonsai will be revolutionizing the $350 billion customer service industry. At the core of Bonsai, there are three main features. Realtime ticket triaging in which new tickets will be automatically assigned to the appropriate categories based on the subject matter. Instant Query Responses where with the power of deep learning Bonsai intelligently crafts a suggested answer for tickets using the company’s knowledge base. And lastly, a streamlined support system where the company’s articles and demos can be sent through the click of a button to further assist customers.

How I built it

To build the web platform, we used React JS, Redux, and Material UI for the crux of the project. For the backend of our project, our project takes advantage of Google Cloud Services in conjunction with Firebase. In terms of the machine learning side we have hosted our machine learning model on Amazon Web Services, and that is communicating with our application using Express JS.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges that we ran into our project would definitely be the communication aspect being with COVID-19, conventional face-to-face communication was not possible. This is where efficiently using version/source control software came in handy. Some of the other challenges we faced were API integration with the ticketing system, making it efficiently streamlining these sources of data into our application while also keeping the UI clean and simple.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we are very proud of is that we were able to come together as a team and complete a lot of work. Not only did we develop a working demo of our project, we were able to create an amazing UI and a video that accurately portrays our project. Most of all, we are most proud of being able to create an application that has a wide range of applications and can truly impact businesses across a multitude of industries.

What I learned

We learned a ton of stuff when working on Bonsai! This ranged from learning to effectively use GitHub for collaboration across our team and using various API integrations in a streamlined approach. Aside from the technical aspects, we learned a lot about video production and editing and were able to improve and gain new skills.

What's next for Bonsai

The sky's the limit. We plan to continue to build out this application and work on our machine learning algorithm to effectively give more accurate answer suggestions. One aspect we plan to expand on greatly is our triaging system by implementing selective search within the company's knowledge base to improve the performance.