Enhance Customer Service with Virtual Agents!

Microsoft just announced that Power Virtual Agent is now generally available, so it's time to put it to good use.

If you haven't heard about Virtual Agents, my colleague Dhina has posted a great introduction to them on his blog, so go check check that out! In a nutshell, virtual agents are chatbots that can help streamline and improve the efficiency of your customer engagement activities.

Power Virtual Agent uses the Microsoft Bot Framework. That framework is aimed at developers, and there is a ton of potential there, but it doesn't in and of itself solve the chatbot problem for the citizen developer. This where where Power Virtual Agent comes into play, marrying the power of this framework with a low/no code UI for building bots.

Now you can add bots of varying levels of complexity to your solution and the learning curve isn't any greater than building apps! Because that's so easy! (work with me here).

Under the hood, there's two key pieces of the puzzle here - the "talking" part (how does the bot carry a conversation and understand language) and the "knowledge & action" part. How does it know and do things?

For the first piece, bots create with the Bot Framework make use of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Interesting side note: my Masters' thesis was in fact on the topic of NLP, using it to identify the language of and translate documents. You don't need NLP to do this, but applying it can help improve the accuracy of translation. This was back in 2006 when this was still a somewhat new thing. Nowadays people are quite used to fairly high quality translation being available in your browser with the click of a button!

For a bit of detail on how the underlying bot works, once again I'd love to point you at Dhina's other post on the topic, which explains it in a bit of detail.

For for the second piece of the puzzle, the answer is pretty simple: Power Automate. Automate (until recently known as Flow) is the engine that drives the agent's ability to answer questions gather resources, and perform actions. If you are familiar with Automate, you should be able to pick up on Agent pretty quickly, it uses a powerful GUI for creating interactions similar to flow:

I'm definitely excited about all the applications and scenarios that this is going to enable. I'm all about customer engagement and like the Portal this is going to be an important puzzle piece for that. Let me know what you all come up with!