Entrepreneurship and Value Creation (FSE/ENT 301) is a class offered to both engineering and business students. The outcome of this class is to investigate pain points that businesses often face on a daily basis, create a solution, then potentially sell it to a buyer. Junior Material Science and Engineering major, Cindy Wong, created a marketable product targeting customer service call centers and the difficulties that face both customers and agents.
Ahnaf, the 22-year-old AppleCare at-home advisor, helps customers specifically with Apple iOS issues. He finds it difficult to communicate with customers when there are language barriers and heavy accents. This prevents Ahnaf from helping customers and customers are often dissatisfied with Apple Care’s service.
Cindy’s solution to this predicament is to utilize current day voice technology, specifically with the Amazon Echo Dot, and incorporate an Alexa Skill into it. The Alexa Skill would be utilized to help with translation services between the callers. In addition, the Alexa Skill would also implement all the possible extensions of a company so the incoming caller has an easier time reaching the agent that will assist them properly even with language barriers or heavy accents.
Most competitors that offer translation services don’t work like this particular idea. Others focus on text to speech, document translations, and peer-to-peer translations. They don’t follow the accessibility and convenience that speech-to-speech translation can handle.
For Cindy, entrepreneurship was a completely foreign idea to her. As she progressed further and further into the Entrepreneurship and Value Creation course, she realized the potential in growing a startup and the impact that can create within the community, “I’m really invested in this idea. I know plenty of people who struggle with the inconvenience that customer service calls can get and with today’s technology, this should be easy enough to solve.”