Book Image

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents

By : Nicolae Tarla
Book Image

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents

By: Nicolae Tarla

Overview of this book

Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support. Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization’s public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers. By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents
5
Section 2: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents on Your Website
9
Section 3: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents in Teams
13
Section 4: Best Practices for Power Virtual Agents

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Power Virtual Agents, introduces you to Power Virtual Agents. It provides an overview of the technology's purpose, as well as comparing the specific Microsoft offering against other similar competitors' products.  

Chapter 2, Licensing for Power Virtual Agents, discusses the various licensing options available for implementing this functionality. 

Chapter 3, Building Your First Power Virtual Agent Chatbot, introduces you to the most basic Power Virtual Agent scenario. The most basic chatbot we will create will greet you and engage in a basic conversation, leveraging your responses.

Chapter 4, Creating a Power Virtual Agent for Your Website, leverages the basic knowledge we gathered in the previous chapter to extend the basic Power Virtual Agent we previously built to turn it into a fully functional agent. We will take a specific business scenario and create a more complex Power Virtual Agent. We will provide help to a user based on an existing knowledge library provided on a public site.  

Chapter 5, Integrating a Power Virtual Agent into Your Website, discusses the various presentation formats and technical aspects of introducing a Power Virtual Agent into a public website. We will look at two different scenarios to present and trigger an automated agent on public pages. 

Chapter 6, Handling Authentication and Personalization, delves deeper into the role of a Power Virtual Agent, with the ability to authenticate a user and provide personalized services. We will look at retrieving account details based on an already identified customer. 

Chapter 7, Building a Power Virtual Agents Application for Teams, describes the process of building a Power Virtual Agent targeted at internal organizational stakeholders and team members. We will look at the differences between a public agent and an agent targeted at internal users.

Chapter 8, Integrating the Power Virtual Agent into Teams, presents details on integrating and leveraging a Power Virtual Agent from within Teams. We will build a Power Virtual Agent that will provide services through Microsoft Teams. We will show in this scenario how to integrate a Power Virtual Agent into Teams.

Chapter 9, Serving Information from Various Sources, discusses leveraging the available connectors to retrieve and present information in a conversation. We will look at a typical scenario for self-service when requesting information from your internal HR department. 

Chapter 10, Power Virtual Agents Governance, looks at governance considerations when implementing the Power Virtual Agents functionality in an organization. 

Chapter 11, Power Virtual Agents Best Practices, focuses on best practices when implementing Power Virtual Agents. 

Chapter 12, Power Virtual Agents Administration, focuses on the administration of environments with Power Virtual Agents deployed.