Real-time conversation remains one of the most common methods of user engagement by organizations of all sorts and sizes. Yet it is filled with complexities and inefficiencies. Businesses struggle to convey adequate instructions to business partners, customers, and even employees. Together with inept communication channels, departmental silos, and unreliable tech equipment, it causes a surge in operational costs and reduces customer satisfaction levels.
Resolving queries of customers, online visitors, and employees requires an active chat facility for quick resolution. In that, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, from the Microsoft Power Platform suite serve the purpose. It is an essential communication tool that is a no-code software leveraging capabilities that quickly creates intelligent bots without technical complexities.
Power Virtual Agents boost self-service abilities and reduce the pressures on customer support teams by bringing the brand closer to its customers. By integrating with Dynamics 365, it puts the power of deploying solutions to problems through a virtual agent in the hands of the subject matter experts—your customer service team. In that, it can:
- Dashboard showcase valuable insights to track users and automate AI-driven data
- Create conversations from scratch, via pre-built industry-specific templates
- Integrating virtual agents and human agents for added support
- AI-powered analytics for continuous improvement
In essence, Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 converge to strengthen the CRM and ERP capabilities for optimized business growth and ensuring customer satisfaction.
This blog unfolds the revolutionary power of Power Virtual Agents as it streamlines omnichannel communication levels and contributes towards lead generation, an ultimate business objective.
Power Virtual Agents at Work
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is a SaaS solution that facilitates organizations to make customizable Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots between internal (employees) and external (customers) to bridge communication.
Power Virtual Agents enable organizations to create a graphic and user-friendly interface with a limited installation process. It manifests an added capability to add relevant FAQ data, create order, reply in a natural language via slot filing, and skip essential queries.
Moreover, Microsoft Power Virtual Agent works best with Power Automate to execute necessary orders and link the connectors to the back-end system. With a robust chatbot performing the assigned tasks, businesses can turn their attention to other activities, making room for fine-tuning the improvements and getting the best use of this AI-driven intelligent tool.
Power Virtual Agents – In Action!
Microsoft Power Virtual Agent continuously offers seamless synchronization for added sophisticated functionality at every step. With the updated features, it tunes the simple conversation flow into a complex process.
Beginning from a defined topic, the bot conversation initiates. It is a fully customizable and guided process allowing users to create from scratch or use the pre-built templates. Topics are the trigger phrases, constituting phrases, keywords, or questions, that the user is predicted to inquire about.
Following this, the conversation nodes determine how the bot should respond. The inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps create an adequate answer to the question asked.
It further includes Calls to Action that retrieves information from different systems (like SharePoint) and transfers it to another topic within the tool. It means that the user can create bots for simplifying the complete transaction process in one go. For more complex conversations and the need for troubleshooting the errors, the conversation can be redirected to a live agent.
Strong analytics that illustrates how users are interacting with a Topic/query, the volume of usage, completion and abandonment rates, and other metrics are a strong competency of Power Virtual Agents right out of the box. Authors may adjust things like introducing additional trigger stages with the use of an analytics dashboard that is well-designed down to the topic level.
Additionally, Power Virtual Agents makes it simple to publish your bot to a variety of channels, such as Microsoft Teams, your intranet or website, and even Cortana with speech recognition.
Benefits of Power Virtual Agents
An intriguing solution that successfully democratizes bot design throughout the organization is Power Virtual Agents. It is very potent due to several exceptional features including:
The excellent design allows subject-matter experts’ contribution
Microsoft Power Virtual Agent hosts a user-friendly authoring canvas, enabling the subject matter experts to directly create and set up a bot. From helping develop specialized solutions for in-depth domain or subject matter expertise, it helps non-IT individuals to actively make improvements and directly customize the bots.
Bot tool promotes continuous progress
Good bot design is iterative by nature; to make the bot more efficient, preferably through a process of continuous development, you must adjust and enhance it. This is reflected in the way that Power Virtual Agents are built; the writing canvas is incredibly flexible and makes updates and additions simple. You may easily go from the analytics page to the writing canvas (and vice versa) with only one click, making it incredibly convenient to access the analytics to inform the necessary design adjustments.
Integration drives power and value
The straightforward integration of Power Virtual Agents with the rest of Power Automate, the Microsoft 365 suite, and other systems, frequently right out of the box, is a definite benefit. With the ability to publish to various channels, the handing over to live chat with an agent receiving the history of a discussion is a powerful feature that encourages excellent adoption. Pre-built connectors allow you to deploy your chatbots to your website, social media, Microsoft Teams, or your apps and enhance practical business procedures.
You can continue to work with your developers
Power Virtual Agents may have a no-code user interface geared at non-IT experts, but your software engineers may still work with Power Virtual Agents using the conventional coding environments. This allows IT departments to create a bot and then transfer ownership and control to non-IT staff.
Improves customer satisfaction
The primary target of Power Virtual Agent is to plump up the overall business productivity levels while minimizing the company’s dependency on technical and IT teams. Investing in omnichannel communication levels automates conversation, timely follow-ups, and handling repetitive queries to divert focus on complicated and proactive tasks.
2022 Release Wave 1
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents enable anyone in your organization to create AI-powered bots that can chat with users on specific topics. The newest 2022 release wave 1 brings improvements in the authoring experiences with topic suggestions, including proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, subject ideas from bot sessions, Power Apps Portals integration, choices for preventing data loss, and more.
EASY TO CREATE FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE CHATBOTS
Creating a bot often requires lengthy content update cycles. However, with Power Virtual Agents on board, anyone can build a simple, code-free graphical interface and set it into action. The bot capabilities can further be extended with the API backends via seamless integration with Power Automate and Microsoft Bot Framework. In that, these bots can handle multiple topics and conversations simultaneously and run functionality checks to uphold the performance levels.
Conversational Chatbot – Assessing your Business Requirements
Here is a quick walkthrough to assess the business requirements before executing the conversational chatbots into your framework.
What kinds of inquiries/requests do your business encounter?
You’ll be more likely to get a significant return on your investment if you already employ human agents to handle a sizable volume of inquiries or requests centered on similar topics.
How long do your agents currently take to respond to inquiries or requests?
Accessible 34/7, chatbots give individuals the ability to seek help whenever they need it, without any wait. Seamlessly handling support tasks and giving staff members more time to focus on other tasks helps improve customer satisfaction.
Who is the intended consumer for your product or service?
Everyone uses technology daily, but millennials prefer chat applications to email for communication. Therefore, study the demographics of your target audience and simultaneously accommodate their preferred mode of contact.
How does your business gather leads?
Conversational chatbots engage consumers in pleasant dialogues, refer purchase suggestions, and assist your sales and marketing teams in qualifying leads.
Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of Chatbots
Building AI-driven chatbots are centered on customers’ expectations. But business expectations are just as important as those of your consumers. To gauge how well you’re achieving your objectives, it’s crucial to develop and monitor strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) for your chatbot.
Popular chatbot KPIs include:
- Total sessions to track the total number of sessions in a specified period.
- Engagement rate to track the number of engaging sessions (ending with a human agent)
- Resolution rate to track the percentage of engaging sessions that are resolved
- Escalation rate to track the percentage of engaging sessions that are escalated to a human agent
- Abandon rate to track the percentage of engaging sessions that are abandoned
- Customer satisfaction to track average customer satisfaction survey data in a score chart.
The goal of chatbot KPI is to cite what is the best way to help the users. After the results draw up, the user can look up the numbers to see the effectiveness of chatbots, and whether it requires any adjustments or not.
Identifying the right chatbot software
Business customers no longer need to rely on developers or data scientists to establish a chatbot thanks to the rise of low-code and no-code conversational AI software solutions. These days, you may discover all the resources you need in a single, practical solution to create an AI-driven chatbot.
However, choosing the best software to construct your chatbot is a key first step that will have an impact on all subsequent steps.
Robust Chatbots, Eliminating Communication Complexities Round-the-Clock
Power Virtual Agents help businesses get started with conversational chatbots and reap maximum benefits. Any business using Microsoft Office 365 and Power Virtual Agents may begin developing chatbots to automate several use cases. True to Microsoft’s aim of enabling every person and every organization to achieve more, something that was formerly thought of as complicated has now been democratized.
Businesses can observe the monumental shift from applications to conversational bots as it accelerates chatbot proliferation inside an organization. Leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Virtual Agents harnesses the ERP and CRM abilities of enterprises, which are further reflected in the AI-driven analytics as presented by Power BI for added convenience and integrability. Therefore, it becomes the right business solution to efficiently eliminate redundancies.
Enveloping Your Business Success
As businesses continue to embed the strengths of Power Virtual Agents, they look for swift implementation partners to speed up the deployment process in a promising timeframe. Dynamics Solution and Technology enables users to create bots from scratch or link current bots to create new virtual agents as part of a unified company identity. Along with that, it stays aligned with Microsoft in proving value-added benefits to its consumers and enhancing their growth.
The expertise of Dynamics Solution and Technology helps clients build and deploy AI chatbots quickly with Microsoft’s low-code bot-building application Power Virtual Agents. Being a Microsoft Gold Partner and a massive global client footprint, our knowledge and skills amalgamate to automate your client support, enhance customer satisfaction, and optimize lead generation.
Connect and get started with your chat automation.
United Kingdom
Saudi Arabia
UAE
South Africa
Pakistan
India
Malaysia
Bahrain
