Amazon Lex and Slack as your Business' Hub
During the first part of my career in IT, I helped organizations implement enterprise-grade Systems Management Solutions - think IBM Tivoli, BMC, HP Openview, etc. - you name it and I most likely installed, configured and maintained the systems companies use to monitor and manage their IT infrastructure. The ‘holy grail’ of Systems Management was a centralized console. The idea was to consolidate all of the information from all of the monitoring and management tools into a single dashboard where everyone could get the information they needed regardless of job function.
Here’s what everyone wanted:
Looks simple enough, but getting everything integrated took time and since all the tools spoke their own “language” you had to have a broad range of skills on the team to make it happen.
In January, I started an [AWS consulting and Managed Services] (https://curiousorbit.com) business and what I realized almost immediately was 1) my customers always asked me the same questions, and 2) I always wanted to look up the same information about my clients. Like many small businesses, I use several SaaS solutions to run my business; this meant to get the information I needed to log in to a bunch of different tools.
I spend a fair amount of my day in Slack. I run my own Public Cloud Slack group, I use it to help support my Managed Services customers, and I belong to a few great communities. As I thought about it more, I realized that Slack had become my centralized console. With this realization in hand, I set out to transform my current Slack deployment from communications tool to a centralized console which will help me manage my business.
I’ve talked about [ChatBots] (https://curiousorbit.com/blog/building-my-first-slack-bot/) before and even created a very simple bot named Ruprecht awhile ago. The issue with Ruprecht was that 1) its functionality was quite limited and 2) the bot itself ran on an EC2 instance - not the best idea, based on [my feelings about OS’.] (http://curiousorbit.com/blog/go-serverless-wherever-possible/)
Here are the basic requirements for the new bot:
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It had to be completely serverless. I didn’t want to have to manage an OS or pay for resources that would be extremely underutilized
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It had to integrate with Slack
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For now, it did not need to be customer facing
I use (and love) BaseCRM to help me manage my pipeline, and next to Slack it’s the SaaS tool where I spend the majority of my time. I figured that building a ChatBot that would tell me about the status of my sales pipeline would be a good (and relatively simple) place to start. As a business owner understanding how many leads and deals I have is essential, so I decided to start there.
Here’s an overview of the tools I used to create the solution
Amazon Lex
I used [Amazon Lex] (https://aws.amazon.com/lex/) to build a conversational bot. Compared with Ruprecht, the new bot can understand intent with minimal effort.
AWS Lambda
I used [AWS Lambda] (https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) to talk to external services, for this version of the ChatBot I’m using the BaseCRM to gather information about leads and deals I’m tracking in my CRM.
BaseCRM
[BaseCRM] (https://getbase.com) is where I track all interactions with my current or prospective customers.
What’s Next?
As I mentioned earlier in the article, I run my business using a number of SaaS tools. I’ll continue to add more functionality with BaseCRM, but also extend the Bot to other SaaS tools like ticketing, etc.