April 17, 2023 | By admin

Find out how to make the most out of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents – empowering teams to create powerful chatbots – to support an improved customer experience at scale.  

Power Virtual Agents, part of the Power Platform, enables customer service professionals to easily create impactful, intelligent chatbots. Power Virtual Agents offers a no-code approach and a graphical interface which can be easily integrated with other Microsoft platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Key benefits of Power Virtual Agents include: 

  • 24/7 customer service, keeping your customers across all time zones satisfied 
  • Reduced cost of hiring additional customer service agents 
  • Complex tasks escalation: Virtual agents can resolve low-level requests and can automatically escalate more complex requests to a live agent with context 
  • Personalised troubleshooting: Virtual agents can integrate with back-end systems, providing access to information like customer and employee data. This means agents can offer tailored responses to an individual’s enquiries. 
  • Repetitive tasks automation: Virtual agents can manage tedious or repetitive tasks such as qualifying leads or processing incoming service tickets. This means that business processes are streamlined and employees are empowered to dedicate time and effort to more valuable projects. 

So, what are some ways that you can make the most out of Power Virtual Agents?  

Chat-GPT development tools 

The latest GPT in Power Virtual Agents enables you to build your own GPT chatbots, building a ready-made Q&A system with just a couple of clicks.  By pointing the GPT chatbot to your organisation’s website, it will learn its content as well as process, compliance and training information. This means an intelligent chatbot can be built to carry out a range of tasks, such as:  

  • Reading through service manuals to enable customers to find troubleshooting pointers or repair tips  
  • Scanning your website for products and services you provide to offer upsell and cross-sell capabilities.  

Using Power Virtual Agents, you can digitalise experiences that benefit employees by enabling them to query onboarding programmes, provide guides to career pathways or instantly provide them with the HR document they are searching for. 

Conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents 

Previously, chatbots relied on the maker / developer to create conversation topics and configure dialogue flows. This meant that when a bot encountered a question or response that it hadn’t been trained on, it could only respond in one of two ways: asking the user to rephrase, or offering to connect to a human agent – scenarios we are all too familiar with. 

With the conversation booster feature in Power Virtual Agents, when you connect the bot to your company website, the bot can immediately start to use that data to construct a response. 

This means that out of the box, the bot is ready to answer user questions based on the information on your site—all without authoring a single topic or spending additional development cycles. This gives developers more time to focus on building complex conversation flows and delivering increased resolution rates and improved customer outcomes. 

If you’d like to find out more, here’s a video on how to build customer-facing bots:

Use analytics to measure and improve bot performance 

From the Power Virtual Agents platform, users can easily navigate the analytics tab to find a variety of key performance indicators to assign to the bot. Charts are available to show trends and usage figures for your bot’s topics, as well as the percentage of engaged, resolved and escalated sessions that your bot has had. These contribute to the resolution rate – the higher, the better! 

The bot’s unengaged sessions (where your selected chatbot topics have not been relevant) can be found via the sessions tab, and these can be investigated to adapt and improve your bot’s topics and performance. Customer satisfaction topics are also visualised on this platform to help users identify where the bot is falling behind on satisfaction.