We're thrilled to share with you that Leonardo has won 2019 Red Hat Hackathon 'ReBoot Customer Experience with Open Source'.
Early on Friday morning ( 5am AEDT 13th December 2019), Leonardo awarded first place from a field that included 320 participants from across the globe.
The Hackathon's brief was to reinvent customer experience using Open Source.
Providing an outstanding customer experience that customers actually love is especially challenging in more traditional industries like banking, insurance, telecommunication, public sector/government, healthcare, manufacturing, or transportation. These markets offer great opportunities for change and disruption as has been shown by many examples such as Uber disrupting transportation, Twilio disrupting telcos and Stripe or Transferwise disrupting banking.
We want you to be the next disrupter who creates a customer experience that users actually love.
An Open Source solution - ACE Airline Customer Experience
Our project is an application using a Red Hat Process Automation Manager process-as-microservice developed for "ACE Airlines", our fictional client (see video above for the demo). It communicates personalised, event-driven (gate change, delay, etc.) messages to passengers in the language of their choice, using their preferred communications type (SMS, push notification, email).Leonardo used a combination of business rules determine how we personalise the messages, which range from informational (such as a delay, or a gate change, etc.) to marketing offers (upsell/discounted items).
This approach can help the airline for increase revenue generation (e.g. discounted offer to upgrade to business class) while doing so in a way that makes the customer feel as if he or she is valued by the airline (such as a free upgrade to business for a platinum frequent flyer).
We think that an airline that is able to rapidly and flexibly make customer experience improvements in days, not months (to either innovate or match a competitor’s improvement) gains an important competitive advantage over rivals. Red Hat Process Automation Manager on OpenShift is the Open Source technology to enable that opportunity.
Our inspiration to improve customer experience
As a consulting team - we do a lot of flying and have had a fair share of bad customer experiences. One of the worst things an airline can do is leave a passenger in the dark, or be seen as uncaring during those frustrating moments, ( flight delay, or, cancellation).
Airlines are improving with customer experience. Customers might receive an SMS, or a push notification informing us of a gate change if we have installed their mobile app on our smartphones. However, this functionality is typically built inside the airline’s monolithic core business application which makes it hard for such enterprises to be proactive with these customer-centric offers.
An agile approach that supports continuous improvement
We believe a combination of Agile methods, DevOps, and microservices means that traditional waterfall approaches can be replaced with nimbler, quicker deployments to drive better customer experiences.
Moving this functionality out of the monolith and into Red Hat Process Automation Manager, and using DRL(Drools Rule Language) and/or DMN (Decision Modeling and Notation) to personalise interactions with passengers would allow changes or additions to be made in days, instead of months.
Our solution supports ongoing continuous improvement to customer experience rather than a one-off improvement.
Leonardo has contributed the source code on GitHub. For detail, refer to - https://github.com/ldcloud?q=rhh-ace
Leonardo was thrilled to make the shortlist from entrants right across the world. Our team enjoyed the challenge, the learning experience and the technologies we innovated with. The project allowed us to ponder ‘what if? beyond the commercial realities of typical project work
The camaraderie of pulling together a skilled team, and producing something globally innovative to achieve a solution that ultimately has been judged as the winning entry is something we cherish dearly. We're mightily humbled by this prize - especially alongside such great entries from this vibrant open source community.
