By now, you may have heard of Microsoft Virtual Agents, the incredible little bots that have transformed customer service. Still, you may not have heard of Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents, the bots that are easier to use for customer service and beyond.
These powerfully smart and ever learning bots change how you interact with customers on every platform, allowing anyone on your team to build their bot of choice no matter their skill level.
Let us explore how you can use Power Virtual Agents to create sophisticated, AI-power chatbots for your business, solving common issues and answering questions around the clock.
Understanding Power Virtual Agents
Chatbots are traditionally complex applications; developing and updating them required a team of skilled professional developers. As useful as chatbots are, this challenge limited their usefulness in many businesses. Microsoft Power Virtual Agents changes this.
Power Virtual Agents is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables anyone to create and update chatbots independently. Out-of-the-box integration, extensibility to Azure Bot Service, and AI-driven insights to monitor chatbot performance are just a few other features that make this development platform unique.
What is a Power Virtual Agents Chatbot?
The defining characteristic of a chatbot is the conversational interface. Whether you communicate with the chatbot through typing or speaking, you and the bot interact in a natural language.
A chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents has this essential characteristic, but what makes it unique is its ability to address bot-making’s three traditional barriers. These three barriers include: anyone can create chatbots, anyone can update chatbots, and bots can integrate with backend systems.
Although anyone can create and update their chatbots, IT needs to remain involved in the process. Chatbots made with Power Virtual Agents are subject to IT governance and compliance requirements.
Learning How to Use Power Virtual Agents
The process of creating a chatbot with Power Virtual Agents is relatively straightforward. You begin by giving your chatbot a name and clicking the ‘Create’ button. Next, you create a group of topics for the chatbot. A topic defines a specific conversion path, a subject on which your chatbot can interact with a customer.
Additionally, you can use trigger phrases for each chatbot’s topics to support the chatbot in determining which conversation it should execute during the interaction.
Once the chatbot is ready to go live, you and your team can determine its channels to connect with your audience. The options include web pages, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and much more.
The Benefits of Building Chatbots
The benefits of building chatbots with Power Virtual Agents go beyond the obvious. Not only can you create an intelligent chatbot on a no to low-code platform, but your business can deploy multiple customer or employee-facing chatbots to address HR questions or team training.
Below are a couple more benefits your team may reap from building bots using Power Virtual Agents.
Build Capacity with Bots
Building organizational capacity is essential to building robust business infrastructure. You can quickly produce the extra help you need with Power Virtual Agents. AI-powered chatbots can efficiently resolve common problems and answer questions that would initially consume the bandwidth of a crucial member of your team.
Since your team can easily integrate chatbots with the products and services you use every day, chatbots can look up records, personalize conversations, transfer conversations to live agents, and call APIs.
Empower Your Employees
Your employees know the requirements of building a chatbot. With Power Virtual Agents, they are empowered to make chatbots quickly to address standard business processes and frequently asked questions within Microsoft Teams.
This integration allows your team to create digital assistants, supporting them throughout the workday.
Connecting to the Bot Framework
Users can easily extend a chatbot’s code when necessary when using Power Virtual Agents. Your team can connect to Azure Bot Framework skills, call Azure cognitive services, and utilize existing chatbots on the Bot Framework in tandem with Power Virtual Agents. This connection is vital for your company’s developers, who prefer an inline coding experience.
Developers can extend their chatbot with an open-source Bot Framework software development kit (SDK) and connect with other business users to bring their ideas to life.
Building Bots and Custom Software Solutions with Bauen Solutions
Microsoft designed Power Virtual Agents to allow teams to build and update their chatbots. Partnering with an expert team can help you gain a competitive edge.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Bauen Solutions helps companies solve complex business problems by leveraging cutting edge solutions in Azure and the Microsoft Power Platform. Bauen works side-by-side with your team to define, develop, deploy, and manage a customized software solution, such as personalized chatbots, to meet your needs and budget.
If you are ready to start building bots to enhance your customer service and beyond, contact us here or send us a note at info@bauensolutions.com.
