- Team Name: N/A (signed in as Curt Bryan)
- Team Leader: Curt Bryan
- Leader Email Address: curtbryan3rd@gmail.com
- Hackathon Track: Build Something Amazing
In file named "slides.pdf"
Hello, my name is Curt Bryan, and my hack idea was to create a power dialer in Twilio.
For those who do not know what a dialer is, let alone a power dialer, it is very simple. When you or your company have a call center, and you want to efficiently call as many leads as possible in a day, it gets very expensive to have your representatives call each number one at a time. A way the industry has figured to keep cost lower is to have a "dialer", or automated calling to your leads. A dialer does the time consuming part of calling and more importantly, understanding when a lead has actually answered the call. If the lead has answered the call, if transfers the call immediately to an available representive to start speaking with the lead.
Why did I want to create a power dialer? I needed to figure out a way to create a dialer that was not reliant on a all-in-one communication solution. I have been using Twilio at University of Phoenix for while now to handle other things, and we are currently in the midst of moving our communication platform from on-premises to the cloud.
We all know as developers that API first and pay-as-you-go platforms are the future, and Twilio is exactly that. Every aspect of their platform is API first and you only are charged for exactly what you use, and not having to pay for a license fee just for the provlidge to experiment with their tech.
What makes this so powerful even in a basic form like miine today, is that you and your company can save a ton of people hours from not having your reps dial, wait for a call pick up, and end the call if they get to a voicemail isntead.
The future state of this will be a few things
- getting it tweaked to use event-streaming like kafka to do the calls in real time as leads come into your companies systems
- Adding AI/ML learning for skills and availability routing
- Making the Twilio Flex UI interface answer the call immediately for the agent, so lead will never hear hold music, so it seems like the representative called them, and not a robot.
Here is a short demo of the functionality.
So why is this hack awesome? Because I have taken the third party out of creating a dialer for your company. This is also an open source solution, so anyone can use and make their own dialer out of this paradigm. Easily reported on because New Relic can be added whereever code is.
In a few short hours I created this proof of concept, because of the power of NodeJS and Twilio! API first is the new standard.