Auto Responder App in 5 Easy Steps

Companies interact with their customers through various channels e.g. Email, SMS, Consumer Forums / Social Media, Mobile Apps etc. This communication involves answering various customer queries, providing product related information, or catering to their service requests. Companies manage these requests through call centers (human interface) or through semi-automated Bots. But in specific scenarios e.g. New Product Launch, or Year Ending Events — Product Sale, Tax Deadlines there could be sudden surge in request volume which is difficult to dealt with due to finite resources.

COVID-19 Pandemic is one of such example of chaos where companies are not able to cope up with the data tsunami causing dissatisfaction among their customers.

Following are few examples of businesses affected due to COVID-19 situation 1. Indian Government has announced moratorium for Loan EMI for 3 months, Financial institutions are getting bombarded with large volume of request from their customers either asking for more information or waive off their EMI.

2. Travel Companies all over world are getting large volume of communication from their customers to get refund or inquiries on travel rescheduling

3.Online Shopping Portals — Customers awaiting product deliveries are either asking for delivery status or refund via emails

One can jot down the common requirements across these scenarios –

1. Monitor & Process Received Messages / Email for configured account & Classify

2. Parse & Understand Intent from messages

3. Responding to customer with required action within pre-defined SLA

To build this app in current situation need significant time & effort. If you are affected due to current situation then fear not you are at right place. Microsoft Azure PaaS components will help you create this app by following 5 easy steps.

Let’s first get familiar with components –

1. Logic App — Managed service that helps you schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows

2. Azure Function — Server-less Compute Service that can run your business logic

3. LUIS — Helps identifying the valuable info from the conversation

I will show you how to parse email messages, classify based on subject / body content , identify intent and take action on it

So, let’s get Started –

Step-1: Configure Azure Logic Apps to monitor Configured account at predefined frequency.

Step-2: Configure Azure Functions to Parse email body and Invoke LUIS APIs to get the Intent. You can make use of LUIS adapter of Logic Apps but Azure Function helps you quickly parse the incoming email body and return JSON

Step-3: Parse Returned Intent response and set variable that can be referred in later steps

Step-4: Configure a condition to check for specific rule e.g. rescheduling of travel / refund / moratorium

Step-5: Based on the result of above condition either respond back to user or create service ticket using available connectors in Logic Apps

Once done just enable the Logic App and your app is ready to serve requests

Disclaimer- idea expressed in the blog is a view of individual and has nothing to do with any specific cloud provider