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

Description of the business scenario

For the purpose of this introductory chapter to Power Virtual Agents for Teams, we will look at creating a simple human resources (HR) chatbot for Teams that will return information about holidays and remaining vacation days. A user will be able to interact with the chatbot and request details on holidays for the current year, as well as to get more personalized information about their respective remaining vacation days.

As you will see, the process to create a chatbot is, for Teams, quite similar to the one for creating a chatbot for the web. The user interface (UI) is identical, and the topics and actions are created in a similar fashion. The main difference stems from the fact that, while exposing the chatbot through Teams, we now have context about the user interacting with the chatbot, and we have no need to process the user authentication.

Let's see next how to build our first Power Virtual Agents application for Teams.