Key Benefits of Bizchat
Internet provides all kinds of travel information such that customers do not contact travel agencies to get information and choose best offers this has impacted travel agencies in the face of fierce completion resulting into reduction of the productivity of organization.
The desktop application would be developed to help customers connect with the internal staff of the organization to discuss problems or ask queries. As soon as a visitor would come on the website of Royal Cruise, a chat window would pop up allowing visitors to connect with the service representative of the organization. At the backend, a desktop application would be developed for the use of employees allowing them to connect with the customers as well as other internal employees. Moreover, internal users would have more options than to just chat with customer such as access to product or service information, special deals, cruise search option, etc. This would help the person better serve the information need of the customer. For this, a desktop application called BIZCHAT would be developed which would be live chat software that can be used by employees to connect with their customers and website visitors. This chat would be used by employees for resolving customer queries, give them detailed information about organization, booking, deals and offers.
The chat application would allow customers to live chat with service representatives who would also be able to chat with internal employees. Multiple service representatives may also be able to chat with customers if required in response to query posted by the customer on the chat window. The chat application would have both audio and video call facilities that can be used by internal employees for connecting with each other.
Royal Cruise is a cruise travel organization from Auckland, New Zealand that provides cruise tours and ship travel services. It has 50 employees working for it and it provides 70 different itineraries across different nations to serve travellers. The Destinations it covers include the Caribbean, Panama Canal, Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Asia, India, and Canada/New England and serves 1.5 Lakhs guests across globe.
The organization faces the real challenge which is inability to engage customers or visitors on the website and with the organization. If there is a way that employees of the organization can be connected to directly by the travellers then there is a chance of increasing engagement of people with the travel brand. There is a need to engage users as soon as they visit the website of a travel company.
Software Development and Testing
Royal Cruise will have two key target groups:
- High income, health conscious professionals who earn over $75,000 annually. These customers are well established and look for customized services.
- Young and active millionaires who have good money to spend because of their rich parents and they like to have fun and do physical activities without the concerns of expenditures.
The key value proposition of this desktop application is that it would allow employs to serve the needs of customers easily. Specific benefits that this application would provide include:
- Customers would be able to contact the service people directly through a live chat and don’t have to look for contact detail to connect which would be very convenient for them
- The app would improve customer service with the ability of service representatives to address customer queries directly.
- The internal communication of the company would improve as employees would be able to talk to each other via the chat application
- Live chat is more cost effective than on call support
- Multiple live chat windows can be used by employees to serve several customers at the same time which can help increase conversion rates or sales.
Electron which is application development framework that can be used with Javascript, HTML, and CSS technologies would be used as it provides cross platform development capabilities, is an open source platform, and easy to use for native application development.
For coding, JavaFX wuld be used as it has a great UI toolkit and can be used both for development of applications on Windows and Mac.
The application is native desktop based but it would be connected with the cloud based chat API which would be available on the website of the company. Google cloud messaging would be used for creating instant messaging application that would be connected with the BIZCHAT application at the backend.
The software design would have 4 key interfaces including the home page, login page, application page, and chat window.
Home Page: Upon opening the application, a user would see the interface as shown above which would be used for exploring information or logging into the system
Login Page: The login interface is shown in the picture above that allows a user to enter username and passwork to get into the system.
Application Page: After logging in, the user would have options to search for cruise, explore deals, hotels, flights, tours, or cruises infomraiton, and cahrt with internal team or with customers.
Chat Window: The software would have a chat interface which would allow employees to chat with online customers and other team members as shown in the picture above.
Development: There can be several development methodologies that can be used for the current application from build and fix model, waterfall model, rapid prototyping model, incremental model, spiral model, and iterative model. As the ultimate aim of developing this application is that customers are satisfied and thus, rapid prototyping could be used but as the application can be large involving may features, iteration may be required. Moreover, it is an in-house application with mot requirements known clearly in advance, the application can use spiral methodology for development (Prince, 2016).
Testing: Windows application testing would be used which would begin with the installation of testing environment and then multiple types of testing would be done including compatibility testing, backward testing, upgrade testing, interoperatability testing, interface testing, functional testing, integration testing, system testing, usability testing, performance testing, load testing, security testing, and user acceptance testing (Guru99, 2017)
The application would be used for all locations worldwide.
Social media sharing of the information would be available on the application but for limited information which is not confidential to the company.
The customers would be disclosing some of their private information over chat and the same should not be shared publically. The chats of customers would not be saved after the session is completed to maintain privacy and confidentiality (Brey, 2007)
For security, the application security software Veracode would be used that would do the instant scanning of the application in the development environment, evaluate the application code against the security policy, and assess the same for compliance with integrated applications (Veracode, 2017).
Continuous integration would be used for the deployment of the software which would be integrated every day and the processes would be verified as well as tested to identify errors for correction.
User acceptance test would be run using employee representatives would be using various features of software for approval. If the testing reveals bugs or feature that is not as per user expectation then it would result into change requests.
The legacy systems would include the existing applications used in the company such as email application, customer database application, and enterprise data application.
The customer database would be integrated with the chat application.
The enterprise database including company and employee information would be integrated with the chat application.
Software would be maintained by administrators which would include database, system and security maintenance (DZone, 2017).
In future, new enhancements and features can be developed such as document search, online sales, quotation, etc integrated into the application.
The proposal recommends development of a desktop application integrated with cloud based chat interface on customer side.
References
Brey, P., 2007. Ethical Aspects of Information Security and Privacy, s.l.: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
DZone, 2017. What’s Your Continuous Deployment and Integration Strategy?. [Online] Available at: https://dzone.com/articles/what%E2%80%99s-your-continuous[Accessed 19 May 2017].
Guru99, 2017. Application Testing Tutorial: Methodology, Tools, Test Plan, Best Practices. [Online] Available at: https://www.guru99.com/application-testing.html[Accessed 19 May 2017].
Prince, S., 2016. 5 CI/CD Strategies for Faster Software Deployments and Better Automation. [Online] Available at: https://blog.snap-ci.com/blog/2016/08/30/5-ways-build-test-deploy-software-fast/[Accessed 19 May 2017].
Veracode, 2017. APPLICATION SECURITY SOFTWARE. [Online] Available at: https://www.veracode.com/products[Accessed 19 May 2017].
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