MTCS worked with the Apprenticeship Service during the Alpha phase of the Consolidated Support project. This phase of the project explored the use of automation and consolidation of departmental systems to better support the Service's ever-growing customer base.

MTCS developed several prototypes during this phase of the project, including:

• A Customer Service Chat Bot
  An automated chat bot was developed on top of Amazon Lex. The prototype explored a couple of scenarios, one of which performed basic system admin after verifying a customer's identity. Another scenario attempted to answer commonly asked questions, fed off an existing knowledge base, before connecting the customer to an agent upon request.

  Intents were developed to service these example scenarios, and slots captured the parameters to service the request. A custom AWS Lambda written in C#/.NET Standard interacted with APIs to perform these 'actions'.

• Proving System Integration
  Proved out the integration of several considered off-the-shelf helpdesk and CRM solutions, as well as integration with the ITSM solution (ServiceNow) used by the Education & Skills Funding Agency/DfE currently.

  This work was completed in conjunction with the Technology Transformation team to prove out a new Enterprise Architecture strategy: in particular, system integration using microservices over API gateway.

  Prototypes were developed using IBM API Connect, Google Cloud Apigee and Azure API Management.

• Embeddable Knowledge Base 'Widgets'
  Developed an embeddable knowledge base 'widget', designed for use within existing Apprenticeship Service pages. Distributed as a NuGet package, these widgets would display up-to-date snippets and links off to support articles in a live, yet to be acquired consolidated/single knowledge base.

  The widgets could also be used to display service status or notices, without duplicating content in several sources.