flowsuite

Making customer relations easier through AI
MailFlow Functional Diagram
Architecture Diagram

Inspiration

During a summer job as a receptionist at a camping site, Jure was tasked with managing email inquiries. Noticing that many of the questions were repetitive, he started thinking about ways to make the process more efficient. Inspired by the potential of automation, he envisioned a solution that could handle these inquiries automatically, freeing up time for more meaningful tasks.

Now, the chance to turn this vision into reality has come. Together, Moritz, Kevin, Flamur, and Jure are committed to transforming how campgrounds manage inquiries—saving time, reducing costs, and ensuring happier customers.

What it does

We’re developing a cloud-based microservice AI solution to transform customer communication in the hospitality industry, focusing on camping sites initially. Our software FlowSuite consists of MailFlow which automates responses to emails and inquiries, optimizing interactions, saving time, and reducing labour costs. Combined with our other application layer called BookingFlow it integrates seamlessly with CRM systems, making it effortless to handle bookings, FAQs, and routine inquiries. We empower campsites to automate, optimize, and grow, partnering in the digital evolution of hospitality.

How we built it

We started out by first talking about Jures idea and agreeing that it is worth a shot! After we agreed that we wanted to work on the wild track it meant: heads down and IntelliJ up... but well at first we took about 3h to talk about what we wanted to do exactly and what would be feasible to accomplish in about two days.

Flamur and Kevin started to work on a CRM integration layer called BookingFlow which in a nutshell is an adapter and facade pattern wrapping CRM systems in an API which can be called by the Booking Flow Frontend as well as MailFlow to check the availability of a campsite.
Jure reached out to campsites trying to validate the problem he experienced further and did a lot of research as well as planning work to keep us on the same page and going in the right direction whilst he was busy preparing the pitch.
Moritz started to work on MailFlow by creating an easily configurable Quarkus microservice that needs only four variables to connect to ANY mail inbox using IMAP. MailFlow has three very important key features:
1. MailFlow crawls a set of URLs specified by the customer/campsite every three days and extracts their context to provide answers to customers by email based on up-to-date information, furthermore allowing campsites to only maintain their website up-to-date.
2. MailFlow uses the Gemini API via the VertexAI client library to create meaningful responses to unread emails which are fetched using IMAP every X minutes configured by the campsite.
3. Through function calling MailFlow can call several external APIs e.g. getting the weather forecast using the Openweather API or getting information about bookings and availability using BookingFlow which wraps any CRM of any campsite.

Challenges we ran into

As Flamur and Keving were exploring new topics for themselves by trying to build the frontend of BookingFlow they ran into the "horrors" :D of CSS and the famous mighty question: "How to centre a div?". Luckily Moritz was there to support them when needed even tho he had his challenges as well since he was the one mainly developing the MailFlow microservice this weekend. During that, he had a tough challenge getting the Gemini API to perform function calls when a user wanted to know about the availability of a booking for example. Nevertheless, we had A LOT of FUN! ;)

What's next for FlowSuite

We will continue to develop our MailFlow, BookingFlow and the whole FlowSuite during the winter and begin connecting with campsites across Germany.