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

Introducing a PVA for your website

As we saw in the previous chapter, we have an extremely basic agent in place. It handles by default some basic conversation, but it does not really do anything useful for a business.

The provided default functionality handles basic System Topics, as described in the next sections.

The Greeting Topic

This Topic is the first System Topic we will look at. It allows the bot to be triggered by a greeting, and we have a total of 52 default greeting messages in the default language. These cannot be adjusted, modified, or removed. The Greeting Topic is included with all bots and cannot be disabled.

The default functionality is handling the predefined trigger words or phrases, and simply responds with a greeting and the default "how can I help you?" question:

Figure 4.1 – The Greeting Topic

This is your typical entry point into a new conversation with a virtual agent. You can choose to modify the...