To survive and thrive, today’s businesses have to provide timely and empathetic customer service. However, in an always-on digital world, that is no mean feat. As such, businesses are accelerating their use of virtual agents, otherwise known as chatbots, in both business and consumer markets. Virtual agents have become accepted by customers as a core component of the customer experience and have the potential to build customer satisfaction, drive loyalty and generate higher revenues.
While virtual agents offer businesses the ability to scale their customer service offerings and gain new insights into their customers, not all solutions are equal. Microsoft's Power Virtual Agents can be implemented quickly and easily, can be applied to many use cases and offers intelligence and advanced capabilities to help optimise the customer experience and grow business opportunities.
How Do Virtual Agents (Chatbots) Work?
A virtual agent is a piece of software or computer program that simulates human conversation through text or voice interactions, hence their nickname ‘chatbots’. While implementing a chatbot often requires low or no coding, they can have various levels of complexity, which depends on whether they are:
- Stateless, rule-based and structured – These chatbots approach each conversation as if they are interacting with a new user. They’re manually programmed to respond to specific questions with specific answers and, as such, are highly scripted. While it offers simplified programming, it restricts what users can ask.
- Stateful, NLP-based and unstructured – These virtual agents are able to review past interactions and deliver responses in context. They use natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to keep track of information, learn and get smarter with each interaction. As such, they are able to give unstructured responses and deliver increased value.
Each of these types of solutions has a place in the business world. If a chatbot is simply needed to respond to frequently asked questions or perform simple, repetitive tasks, then a stateless solution can suffice. However, if more complex interactions are required, natural language processing is fundamental.
What is a Power Virtual Agent (PVA)?
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a service within the Microsoft Power Platform that enables businesses to easily create powerful, scalable, AI-powered virtual agents that can deal with a range of requests. Whether you need to provide simple answers to commonly asked questions or engage in complex conversations, PVA can provide a solution. PVA can engage with customers and employees in multiple languages over a wide variety of channels, streamline the customer experience and improve customer satisfaction. Moreover, PVA does all that using a guided, low-code/no-code interface without the requirement for developers. The solution democratises AI-based virtual agents, removing the complexity of coding and advanced technologies. Instead, an easy-to-use interface enables users with practically no programming or AI experience to effectively and efficiently build smart bots. Meanwhile, with less time spent deploying and maintaining Microsoft's solution, employees can focus on higher-value work for the business.
What Are the Benefits of Using PVA?
While previous chatbots have been frustrating for both businesses and their customers, PVA changes all of that. With PVA, your bot can communicate easily in any language via text and audio. In fact, it offers several business benefits:
- Simple – You can make, test and publish powerful bots extremely quickly using automation, AI and a collaborative, low-code graphical interface without any prior programming experience.
- Supportive – There is an extensive community ready to help as well as intuitive in-built suggestions to help you quickly navigate the capabilities of the platform.
- Scalable – You can solve customer concerns and queries in multiple languages at any time of day or night, helping you to scale your business regardless of time or time zone.
- Extendable – PVA integrates seamlessly with everyday services through hundreds of inbuilt connectors. You can easily deploy chatbots across websites, social media sites, apps and more. You can also build custom workflows to integrate chatbots with Power Automate and access more complex scenarios.
- Cost-effective– By automating common enquiries, PVA can help you to free up your employees’ time for more complex and value-adding business activities. In addition, there is less room for human error, faster, more effective issue resolution and increased employee and customer satisfaction, all with associated cost benefits.
- Accurate – PVA uses natural language processing to understand human communication and accurately provide relevant answers; bots are incredibly reliable and ensure that your business is always portrayed in the right light.
- Secure –You can deploy PVA bots securely using central administration, built-in security roles and simple management to ensure compliance and governance.
- Smart –PVA has the ability to make smart recommendations; with self-learning, AI and natural language processing can continually improve your bots and their performance.
- Insightful –Intuitive dashboards enable users to easily monitor and improve chatbots through data-driven insights and AI. In addition, you can automatically track critical KPIs and identify future bot topics.
Where Can PVA Be Used?
Power Virtual Agent can be used for everything from customer service to HR and sales on any channel or domain imaginable. Whether you have a small or large business, it can be applied anywhere that you want to engage with your employees or customers. As they can be created without the need for data scientists or developers, PVA bots can be used within just about every industry: customer support, healthcare, entertainment, eCommerce and logistics, to name but a few. Some of the ways they have been used include sales and help desk support information, common employee questions, bookings and customer support.
What Integrations Does PVA Enable?
Power Virtual Agents is available in two distinct versions. While the functionality is fairly similar between the two, the choice between the versions comes down to how you want to use PVA and specific use cases:
- Web App – PVA as a standalone web app is a good choice if you’re an IT admin and want to create bots for your customers, you’ve used chatbot services in the past, or you’re familiar with advanced chatbot concepts and want to create more complex solutions.
- Microsoft Teams App– PVA as a discrete app within Microsoft Teams is a good choice if you’re an employee that wants to create chatbots to answer common questions, you want to use advanced concepts internally or you want to create and publish a chatbot as quickly as possible.
How Can PVA Change Your Business?
The rapidly evolving digital world is changing customer and employee expectations. With conversational chatbots built with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, you can respond rapidly to customer and employee needs at scale. You don’t required any coding or programming experience. With PVA, the power is in your hands to easily build bots that can transform your business.
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