Recognizing the need to provide professional customer service with very unique legal and security challenges, Open Efforts sought a software solution to automate client interaction. We quickly found that a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform for such a unique situation did not exist. In the early development of a custom solution, software engineers ran into innumerable problems. For example, thousands of our clients have the same physical address, and yet they can quickly change addresses without any notice. It’s also common that our clients will be dropped into solitary confinement for an indeterminate amount of time with no notice whatsoever. Open Efforts met these challenges head on.

Today, Open Efforts utilizes an automated platform that parses client requests, and in most cases automatically acts on the requests. Clients can request legal cases, music lyrics, text translations, stock quotes, sports scores, or search Amazon, Wikipedia, and the Web. Additionally, Open Efforts handles all second level requests that for any reason can’t be handled by the application interface. With each human intervention the underlying platform extrapolates the request, and updates internal algorithms to detect and process similar requests without a human representative in the future.

To provide these automated services Open Efforts uses a technology base of open source software systems including those for machine-learning and artificial intelligence. With this open source eco-system Open Efforts can continue to grow service offerings and increase customer service standards in line with growth in these underlying areas of technology.