hi, i saw another post like this so hoping people might be able to save me some time/effort.
mostly I'm looking for a cheap way to have a bot automatically gather some info from my sales guys leads, and turn them into a CSV somewhere a CRM app we're looking at using can get to. I'd accept an email with the results of the questions from the bot. in the much longer term, I'd like to have it answer some basic repeated support questions that he asks on behalf of customers. it'd mostly be sending him links to PDFs (or sending PDFs if that's possible). it really needs to just respond to his keywords and give him back the info he needs before he bothers me for things i've already emailed him yesterday.
from what I can determine, getting the sales guy (or his customers) to speak to a skype bot would make it easiest for him (and thus me). it'd be nice to include it on the website but not trying to automate myself out of work either and i think i could do that.
there aren't that many leads to deal with. maybe 5 a week in the busy cases (but there is hope that will ramp up). as such I'm not sure we can afford PVA but we do have MSDN and there are developers in another office. I'm not a developer though so far this afternoon I'm making PVA do what I need* but since I was hitting the point where I needed to consult the docs, I thought i'd check the forums too, and saw someone else asking a similarish question and hoped maybe it wouldn't hurt if i asked too?
i really hope this post hasn't broken too many rules and appreciate any advice anyone can offer. i'm mostly an overworked tech with enough things to keep me busy but this seemed interesting and useful and so far hasn't needed code 🙂
thank you.
* - my biggest stumbling block so far is asking for a timezone and not wanting to type out the options manually.
