Responsum
Description as a Tweet:
Responsum automates conversation with personalized messages between customer and seller and stores customer responses in a database to find which products/services are popular amongst the customers and to gauge customer engagement.
Inspiration:
Over the past couple of years I've noticed an increase in the number of online "thrift shops" being run on apps like Instagram. These pages would consist of images of clothes along with their prices, and people would use a payment link in the page's bio. This kind of transaction is void of any conversation between customer and seller and limits the popularity of these sellers. Responsum would help in terms of creating a tight knit community of customers and sellers which is almost certain to gain more traction than one just operated to sell items as quick as possible.
What it does:
The project sends emails to customer email IDs asking for the feedback from a recent purchase. Although, the email could be also be about associated topics like input on new releases. Once the customer replies to the email, it is sent to Zapier's email parser which parses the data in the reply email and adds this to a database in the form of a google sheet. This database could be accessed in the future to study customer engagement and popularity of certain products over others.
How we built it:
I built the automated mailing system using Twilio SendGrid Send Mail API. Here you could modify the message that will be sent, add recipients, attachments. To run the script, you must obtain a sendgrid API key. The customer's reply is then forwarded to an email parser mailbox. From here we can run a Zap on Zapier to allocate data from parsed emails to columns and rows of the google sheet.
Technologies we used:
- HTML/CSS
- Python
Challenges we ran into:
Reading through the API reference was probably the toughest challenge I faced during this hackathon. It was the first time I had to deal with such extensive documentation and steps related to working with APIs.
Accomplishments we're proud of:
I'm proud of the amount of work I could do with APIs over the course of this hackathon. I was also proud of being able to build something that could be useful to small organizations within the span of 36 hours.
What we've learned:
I learnt a lot of different computer science and coding concepts while building this but most importantly I learnt about the ability to adapt considering the hurdles that you face while trying to build something while also dealing with a time constraint.
What's next:
I would like to work more with the data from the feedback received in these reply emails and explore the use of sentiment analysis software on this text.
Built with:
Github, VSCode, Twilio SendGrid Send Mail API
Prizes we're going for:
- Best Software Hack
- Best Web Hack
- Best Venture Pitch
- Best Beginner Software Hack
- Best Use of Twilio