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

Knowing your environment

Looking at the editor window can be a little daunting at first. Let's see what each component is and how to navigate around:

Figure 3.6 – PVA editor window

Starting at the very top, we have the banner with the standard Microsoft 365 waffle menu, followed by the PVA product name and your new agent name.

Further to the right, you find the little bot icon, which opens up the Bots menu:

Figure 3.7 – Bots menu

Here you can see the environment you are building in, the current agents already in the selected environment, as well as the option to create a new agent, as seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.8 – Bots in the environment

Important note

Note that the user interface uses the term Bot to represent a virtual agent. The terms can be used interchangeably, with the name Agent being a more recent synonym for Bot.

Further to the right of Figure 3...