Google Wave provides a new way for people to collaborate and interact on the internet and beyond this it provides a new tool and method for companies to communicate with consumers. These days we often buy services from companies and it’s a fact of life that these services sometimes don’t work as we would quite hope, so we seek support for them. At the moment we normally dial up an automated system on the phone or start an email dialogue with a support team. The support teams on the other end of the phone or email often use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Sugar CRM. These systems provide companies with tools that aid to enhance the customers support experience. One example of the functionality is to help support staff trace a case over many communications with potentially many different support staff; unfortunately this can often lead to a confusing conversation with the customer.

So how does Google Wave fit in with existing CRM systems such as Sugar? In a joint venture with expw consulting, we have been very busy integrating Google Wave into Sugar CRM. The rich conversation model that Google Wave provides ties into Sugar perfectly allowing interactive gadgets to enrich the customers experience and provide real time information to them. For example a customer could see a line test being run on their line right inside the chat while they are talking to a member of support.

In developing a project like this we have used and developed a few new technologies and have pushed Wave to a new level. One of the exciting new technologies that we have used is the newly released V2 robot API from Google. The API provides us with many new capabilities including the ability to make a robot communicate with a gadget. This has allowed us to create intuitive gadgets that for example perform line tests that interactively update the user and then report the results back to the robot.

In our Wave based CRM application demo customers are lead through a number of steps. These steps gather information about the issue that the user is experiencing. This information ranges from simple “yes”, “no” answers to questions that require complex information to be displayed; One example is where a customer wants to book a visit from a support engineer. Traditionally the support staff would suggest a date and the customer would return their availability and suggest a new date and so forth. This process is cumbersome and timely requiring both parties looking at their own calendars individually and sending information back and forwards to each other. So why not bring both calendars into a wave for both parties to see? We have a gadget that does this! It is able to retrieve the customers calendar from Google Calendar and the engineers calendar from Sugar. Both parties can see each others availability and can quickly and easily agree to a mutually free date.

So now that we have a nice customer facing system with all these improvements over existing techniques how does it fit in with existing support systems? Well out of the box Wave provides a number of useful features such as playback, so the first step was to embed Wave into Sugar. The wave embed API is excellent and allows us to do this with ease but this isn’t enough. Support will need a way to quickly glimpse at a case and know what’s happened. So what we do is when the robot asks a question it sends the question and response to Sugar CRM through a REST interface. This allows us to keep a complete snapshot of the case in a quickly and easily readable format and also allows us to keep the complete audited conversation in wave.

We’ve used all 3 APIs provided by Google Wave. The robot API, gadget API and embed API and ourselves realised the true power of Google Wave. Are you excited? We are! You can check out two video demos of the system below. Tell us what you think! Comment! Want to know more, why not contact us?

Demo 1

Demo 2