Trust & Transparency at the Spring 2023 Hackathon

Our most innovative 3rd party facing projects from the Q2 2023 Hackathon

Clover’s first hackathon of 2023 aimed to inspire trust for our merchants and developers by taking on the theme of Trust and Transparency. Our hackathon organizers set the playing field by gathering ideas from merchant and developer feedback as well as internal brainstorming.

Our teams delivered! Clover teams across Europe, India, and the United States got together to code, design, and create prototypes that improve a broad range of user experiences, from restaurant operations and the merchant dashboard to third-party app development.

When enthusiasm meets untiring efforts, winning ideas emerge. Here are some of the promising innovations produced between April 25, 2023 and April 27, 2023.

Automatic Tip Manager for merchants

The Automatic Tip Manager is a tip pooling and distribution solution to manage tips collected in service-based businesses, such as restaurants and salons.

The effort to consolidate and tally all the tips earned during a shift and then distribute them to all employees who worked that shift is time-consuming and tedious — often involving calculators or spreadsheets with multiple formulas.

The Automatic Tip Manager’s tip pooling and distribution options eliminate this manual overhead. With the click of a button in the Merchant Dashboard, tip-eligible employees can receive their tips for the day or week. Employees can opt to receive SMS notifications about their tips and can track total tips collected. This service can be integrated with payroll and made available as a mobile or web app with additional distribution options.

Clover Lab-as-a-Service for third-party developers

The Lab-as-a-Service (LaaS) solution makes it easy for developers to test their apps without needing a Clover Developer Kit (Dev Kit). This solution leveraged the design of our in-house lab and modified it to create a partner-facing service.

Dev Kits can be expensive. Emulators, while convenient, can be tricky to use for full testing of an app. These challenges often discourage ample testing of apps, which — well, you can see how this would be problematic.

Making the Clover LaaS available to our partners and third-party developers removes these obstacles. Using a simple web interface or API, developers can submit apps and execute test APKs without needing to order a Dev Kit. The service allows developers to test on a complete range of Clover offerings, backed by a service level agreement (SLA).

When developers shift from manual testing to test automation, test coverage and frequency is easier to implement and scale, which improves the quality and reliability of their offerings to merchants. Everyone wins.

ClovBot — a knowledge base assistant for all Clover queries

ClovBot promises to enhance Clover’s customer service using a custom ChatGPT solution that provides quick answers to frequently asked questions. The goal is exemplary and always-on interactive support.

ClovBot interacts with users through the Clover Merchant Dashboard and Clover Developer Dashboard. The bot provides quick responses and self-service options to find more information or create a support ticket to access live support for questions it cannot resolve. Its algorithm can continuously evolve as it learns from questions asked and feedback received from its users.

To make ClovBot the real single-source of truth for all Clover-related queries will take an ongoing effort to train and optimize the algorithm by feeding it questions and answers from our internal knowledge base. Still, the initial demos show great promise and additional training is underway!

It’s a wrap

The significance of Clover’s 2023 Trust & Transparency Hackathon was its focus on a wide range of users of Clover products and services. From SMB owners and employees to third-party developers, there was something for everyone.

This hackathon sets the tone of priorities for Clover as a service, a platform, and a business partner. From these projects we see that Clover plans to:

• assist business owners in giving their employees the credit they deserve with the Automatic Tip Manager,
• provide developers with efficient testing opportunities through third-party Lab-as-a-Service (LaaS), and
• ensure all Clover users receive support and self-service options, around the clock.

The Clover Hackathon organizing committee thanks all participants for their great ideas and thanks our partners for being the inspiration behind these thoughtful projects!

You can stay updated through this blog, our Clover Docs, or the Merchant Blog: Clover Green. Subscribe here to receive our quarterly newsletter and other developer communications. If you have any questions or concerns, you can email us at developer-relations@devrel.clover.com or visit our 24/7 Clover Community.