Week 6

Management Summary Swisscom

Project: Creating a new website + chatbot

In Spring 2017 the Swisscom Outpost moved from Menlo Park to Palo Alto into an entirely refurbished house with plenty of space for new projects and business ideas. It is basically a move back to their roots here in the Silicon Valley. When the first outpost members came over here, they set up their initial base in Palo Alto. With this move in mind, it was obvious for the Swisscom Outpost that it is time for a rebranding. Part of this rebranding process is a new website. The current website of the Outpost clearly does not hit any state-of-the-art website requirements. Given that, Lukas Peter (CEO Swisscom Outpost) gave us the instruction to create a new Swisscom Outpost web appearance.

In the first week of the ICE we met Lukas, his right-hand when it comes to public relations and communications Mark Waelti also known as Marc and Beni who is responsible for their Cloud services. We sat together and discussed the requirements for the new website. In summary, the most important requirements were:

- Follow the instructions given by the “Brandbook”

- Follow the designer’s instructions and his prototype of the website. Link to the Swisscom Outpost Website Prototype: https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/UCCY7WZZR/#/screens/247698304

- The website must be responsive

- Try not to implement the unloved contact form, find another solution

Short review:

The beginning stage of the project was characterized with plenty of administrative matters. We originally planned to create the web presence with Swisscom’s powerful CMS-tool called “Adobe Experience Manger”. We tried to get access to this system for almost two weeks — to no avail. During this time, we could not work on the website productively. That is why we decided to use the time for solving the “contact form issue”. The idea came up to replace the unwelcome contact form with a modern chatbot. Living in a world of digitalization and automation, we thought this could be a thrilling solution for the Swisscom Outpost. While we had been waiting for the access, we focused our recourses towards the chatbot research and we managed to create a first version of a chatbot prototype. At the end unfortunately, no one could get us an access credentials to the CMS-tool in our short time window. Given that, we had to find another way to set up the website. Because we had strict design requirements, there was only one way to do it. Therefore, we had to program the website with hard coded HTML, CCS and JavaScript code. This was truly a challenge for us but simultaneously an excellent opportunity to master some new web technologies. The following big picture shows the project architecture in a simplified view:

Result and conclusion

On October 18, 2017, the website was officially up and running and handed over to Lukas Peter and can now be accessed publicly. We are extremely pleased with the final version of the website. The new website matches the prototype of the designer without a doubt. Moreover, the website is constructed that it can be extended and adapted easily. Furthermore, we are proud to deliver a properly working solution in terms of contacting the Outpost. We managed to implement a chatbot into the website which assists like a receptionist at a hotel desk. In short, the chatbot allows you to get in contact with Lukas Peter and his team. In a nutshell, our chatbot behaves like this:

- Say Hallo to the website visitor/start-up

- Ask if the visitor wants to get in contact with the Swisscom Outpost

- Filter some interesting facts about the customer/start-up

- Try to set up the first contact

- Sent the gathered information with an automated generated E-Mail to Lukas Peter

The chatbot is clearly a cool feature of our final product. With its help, Swisscom can now save time when they get contacted by a customer or start-up for the first time. Because the chatbot will automatically collect the relevant data, process the data and sent the prepared information to the right recipient.

Last but not least, we would like to say thank you to the Swisscom Outpost for the great opportunity to work on their website project. Thank you for showing us your Silicon Valley way of life.

Sandro Fasser, Matthias Röthlin, Silvan Schacher, Stephan Waser