Hackathon: Where Creativity Becomes Reality!

Hackathon Overview:

As the economy becomes more IT-driven, the need for engineering & software development talent is growing. Universities are working to fill this gap by providing their students with the tools and training needed to succeed in the workforce. These include the ability to work in a team environment under a specified schedule for which universities use the concept of Hackathon.

Here is a case study of ETNA, an IT school based in Paris – France with emphasis on distance education, allowing for greater mobility and student flexibility. Its students account for 96% of their time in business as a result of which 242 projects were completed in the last 3 years.

A good part of these projects is carried out through hackathons which are short-term events where individuals work in teams to create a working software prototype addressing a specific project or need.

ZIWO was part of the companies proposing a project in collaboration with this school. ZIWO is built as a cloud-based, new-generation contact center. It offers API Based CRM integration and advanced features in a web-based, also it comes with a user-friendly interface, requiring no software installation and accessible worldwide.

Below are the details of the Hackathon Event:

No of Students: 60

No of Projects: 3

Objective :

Improve overall customer satisfaction by identifying the sentiments of the clients using Emotion Tagging for Call Recordings using AI

Challenge:

To create a dashboard with a visual representation of call recordings retrieved from the ziwo platform with appropriate emotion tag and overall customer satisfaction during the call analyzed via Microsoft “Azure” platform. Students were required to make an application hosted on the Microsoft Cloud.

Tasks Undertaken:

Call tagging

Students needed to put one or several pertinent labels on a call, using its call history and especially the recording.

Emotion tracker

From the recording of a call, the goal was to track the emotion of the customer throughout the call. Students should at least extract one main emotion from the call, and consider judging the evolution of the customer’s emotion through the call.

Knowledge database

Students aimed to construct a pertinent knowledge database from the recordings of the calls of the call center, in the hope that this should contain questions from customers and the corresponding answers from agents too.

Below is a schema of how Ziwo works in tandem with Microsoft Azure to churn out interesting insights and consumer behavior through emotion tracking and tagging thereby playing a huge role in identifying customer engagement & satisfaction rates thereby improving call center productivity.

Winning Solution Dashboard:

The winners used Microsoft Azure technologies with cloud API to carry out this project. With a Web interface that was very simplistic, they had a dashboard to retrieve the call recordings from Ziwo. Also, they could scan & thus recover the feelings of the person, and tag it accordingly. For them, this platform is fundamental for every startup with call center needs.

Interesting Dashboard by the Runner-up team:

Overall Impact:

This kind of exercise allows companies such as Ziwo to enhance their innovation capacity through new concepts, thereby bridging the gap between IT universities and the companies.

Not only that, it provides students with exposure to essential business community relationships, they can do a lot of networking and knowledge sharing. It provides an opportunity for students to face real practical cases in the business world.

The professionals involved can identify business skill gaps and provide feedback to the university. Moreover, it is a way to create new opportunities for scholarships, sponsorships, also internships for students. With new experiences, future professionals enrich their curriculum vitae and it encourages them to engage in research activities in business. Also, Hackathons keep students up to date with all the recent trends and technologies.

Video Available Here: https://iframe.dacast.com/b/123899/f/692322