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

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at a simplified business scenario, leveraging a Power Virtual Agents application for Teams. We created an agent, expanded on its functionality by adding some business logic, and provided some guidance to the user in the form's predetermined answers to select from.

While the similarities with chatbots for the web are obvious, we now have an understanding of how to create a chatbot for Teams. We have an understanding of the fact that a user in Teams is automatically recognized, and we can provide a much more personalized experience enhanced by information from other integrated systems and platforms.

The presented example is a highly simplified one, but imagine the possibilities of creating such a chatbot to fully manage your vacation request cycle. You could first ask for a listing of standard holidays to determine whether your planned vacation overlaps with any of those days and then determine the remaining vacation days for the current...