Kainos Developers Pitch Innovative Customer Services Solution at FinAppsParty 2012

The competition, which took place on 26-27 October 2012, was held in Barcelona and organised by La Caixa, Spain's third largest financial institution, with support from Barcelona Digital Technology Centre. This year's event welcomed applications from around the globe and saw teams from Spain, Israel, Kenya, Mexico and the UK competing for a top prize of ?10,000. The event format was based on the concept of a 'hackathon', with competing teams working in an agile environment to turn ideas into working prototypes in just 24 hours. Following the marathon coding exercise, each team had 3 minutes to pitch their idea to a panel of judges, with the aim of discovering the most innovative application that brought new functionality, enhanced performance and originality to the table. Commenting on the challenge, Luke McNeice, software developer at Kainos stated, 'During our initial research exercise we learnt that La Caixa already had over 50 apps available for its customers, highlighting the need for our solution to be the first of its kind. We didn't want to create yet another app to add to La Caixa's growing catalogue; we wanted to create a solution that enhanced their existing apps and made them work better.' The team - made up of Kainos software developers Luke McNeice, Kyle Davidson, Will Hamill and Tomasz Janeczko - drew inspiration from the often frustrating experience of contacting an organisation's customer services department and aimed to make the process quicker, easier and an altogether more satisfying encounter for both customers and staff alike. Theoretically, the solution would be embedded within existing La Caixa apps where a customer may benefit from speaking to a customer services agent when trying to complete a task. The solution would enable the user to make a voice over IP (VoIP) call to an agent from within the app, whilst simultaneously sending the customer services agent relevant information including the customer's details, the app they are currently using and what they're doing within it. Armed with a wealth of information, the customer services agent can get straight to the issue without having to spend time capturing it from the customer at the beginning of the call. The solution was developed using a number of technologies including Objective-C, Ruby, Scala and MongoDB and was hosted on the Heroku cloud platform. Luke comments, 'Having a customer services agent greet you by your name and knowing what assistance you need without having to bring them up to speed would be an incredibly refreshing step forward. This is the service that our solution aims to deliver, and it has the potential to provide benefits to any customer services department in any industry.' While the team didn't win the competition this year, they are still keen to develop the solution beyond the prototype phase and are confident that it will catch the eye of an interested party in the near future. Watch the FinAppsParty 2012 promotional video for more information on the event.