SmartAgent wrap up 2022 with special two-day Hackathon

Hackathons are perfect for getting the creativity and problem-solving skills within your team flowing. SmartAgent recently wrapped up 2022 with a special Hackathon event, giving our staff a chance to produce something innovative outside their usual workload. 

Across 2 days, our six Hackathon teams gathered in the Arbeta HQ to brainstorm, design, develop and refine their own SmartAgent features, racing to complete tasks and working collaboratively through any obstacles. Each team was required to come up with an idea for something original and distinct from their normal development schedule, that would also add value for us and our customers. Teams needed to develop an MVP and then demo it to everyone at the end of this dynamic two-day sprint, along with the business case for what they’d come up with.

As expected, the event produced some outstanding ideas and contributions from all participants. Tackling themes that included accessibility, gamification, deployment, customer experience and more, the Hackathon teams delivered impressive and functioning end-products, built from their brand-new ideas.

Despite fierce competition, there could only be a select number of Hackathon winners. Every team was judged based on the innovation, relevance, presentation & the technology that their project displayed, with one winner chosen by judges and a vote by the participants themselves and other observers. 

This year, the worthy winners of the Hackathon were... 

Team ‘Jupiterminators’– Judges Choice award 

What did they produce?  

A webchat monitoring feature that allows supervisors to join a chat and support their agents to provide a better end-customer experience. This project was focussed around making agent training easier and the team included suggestions such as alerts to prompt the supervisor to look into certain chats which had a long handle time or where negative sentiment had been detected. 

And a tie in the vote for the People’s Choice award... 

Team ‘Neptune’ – chosen by participants 

What did they produce? 

Webchat live video that would allow agents and customers to interact over video, with use cases including checks of meter readings for utilities companies, healthcare consultations, or providing evidence for refunds. The feature would also improve the accessibility of SmartAgent and make the application more inclusive for users. 

and...

Team ‘Git to the chopper!’ – chosen by participants

What did they produce? 

Worked with WebSockets to increase their team’s understanding of the technology and understand specific use cases including cost savings due to reduced reliance on polling real-time data within the contact centre environment. They built a game on the technology although, as is the risk with any overly ambitious Hackathon project, it wasn’t quite working at the time of the demo!

Other end-products from the day tackled faster deployment for clients, simpler email configuration, agent-agent contact transfers and an application redesign including what3words addresses for more accurate deliveries... all of which offered inventive new ways to improve SmartAgent. 

We were also joined at the end of the 2-day event by Jon Spriggs & Ewan Steele from AWS, our technology partner, who gave an in-depth and insightful talk, bringing an event all about forward-thinking tech to a fitting close. 

Congratulations to our winning teams, and thank you to everyone who took part in the SmartAgent Hackathon 2022 – your creativity and hard work proved yet again why our solutions are so transformative! We can’t wait to see what innovation the team at SmartAgent produce in 2023. 

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