E-commerce customer support system – Chat for Support

Brief

This project implements a system for well-managed online chat for customer support of the online store. The customer support system is intended to handle customer complaints and answer questions about product features, availability, and price and provide customer services via the Internet. Customers interact with the system through an applet running in the web browser and the system provides real time communication in a chat mode between customers and customer support representatives.
In this system incoming chat requests are automatically routed to an available customer support representative, customer support managers may silently participate in a conversation, and takeover a chat session, if necessary. All of customer requested conversations are tracked and later used in statistical analysis and billing reports.

Architecture

The system consists of two applets (customer applet and customer support representative applet) communicating via RMI to the backend running on the server that accesses database hosted on the SQL Server. The reporting tool is implemented in MS Access connected to the SQL Server.