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

Retrieving data using available connectors

Using a Power Automate flow leverages a large set of available connectors to tap into external systems or data sources and retrieve various pieces of data to be returned to the conversation. There is a large number of available connectors, some created by Microsoft and others created by various vendors. If you cannot find an existing connector for your respective data source, you can always create a new custom connector. Depending on the data source, this could be either a simple configurable process, or it might require some more advanced custom coding.

In our example, we will use an existing Microsoft-provided connector to retrieve data from Dynamics 365 Sales and return to the conversation a set of active opportunity records. You can take a similar approach for any other tables in Dataverse, including standard tables such as Account or Contact if you are not using Dynamics 365 Sales. This example is a common scenario for organizations...