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Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Introduction

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Power Automate (PA), formerly called Flows, are Microsoft’s latest AI innovations and a part of their Power Platform. Enterprises can use these tools separately to solve unique challenges but can also integrate and leverage them together to accomplish a common goal. In this article, we explore the different capabilities of these technologies and how they can be more powerful when integrated with each other!

Understanding Power Virtual Agents

PVA is a low-code chatbot building tool with which you can build and deploy chatbots in the shortest time possible. This democratises the technology to non-technical users and reduces the dependency on IT expertise.

Using PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents.

A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes! IT experts with extensive knowledge in the development of chatbots can also code on PVA for additional customization.

You don’t have to retrain AI models – just provide the bot with a few examples of the conversation topic, use the graphic editor to build conversations and your bot will be ready to perform tasks and take requests! PVA also provides a test pane with which you can play around with changes in real-time.

PVA provides the end-to-end experience of bot development, from the creation of the dialog to deploying it on online platforms like Slack, Teams, Facebook Messenger and MS Teams among many others.

PVA can also be integrated with several other apps including but not limited to, Office 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, OneDrive to gather information from these systems. PVA also provides AI-driven dashboards with which you can track and improve your chatbot’s performance.

Learn More: Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents?

Understanding Power Automate

Power Automate is a low code AI-based solution that allows users to build time-saving workflows for various systems and processes with seamless integration using hundreds of prebuilt connectors. UI flows, the new feature in PA provides Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities that can automate repetitive tasks in Windows and web applications.

Power Automate can currently connect to more than 275 apps and services. With Power Automate, you can automate diverse rules-based tasks like handling data entry, performing calculations, handling queries and back-office operations in HR, Finance and accounting. Power Automate offers the low/no code experience of creating automations with point-and-click operations. PA can not only automate tasks across APIs, SAS platforms, databases but also do UI-based recording on Windows desktop and have that run in your automation workflow.

Power Automate’s UI Flows feature or Power Automate RPA helps you integrate business apps with each other and create automated workflows with an intuitive, no-code interface. The tool provides both attended RPA and unattended RPA and enables you to focus on more high-value work by automating boring, repetitive tasks like front-office activities.

To better understand Power Automate, let’s take the example of an insurance claims processing company where clients fill out digital and paper forms and send emails to communicate. The claim usually gets processed on the cloud but employees also have to maintain paper records and legacy apps. This entire process could be automated by Power Automate: AI can process the digitized data in scanned paper forms and RPA can process legacy systems.

Integrating Power Virtual Agents With Power Automate

Trigger bots to take action!

Chatbots can have conversations with your employees and answer their queries. This is great. But what’s truly powerful is enabling chatbots to act on users’ behalf. Integrating chatbots with back-end and legacy systems is now made easier with Power Virtual Agents – you can do it either out-of-the-box or using custom connectors available on Power Automate.

Integration with legacy enterprise systems which lack modern APIs was a huge challenge for many organizations that are excited to deploy chatbots.

But with the launch of Power Automate this is solved.

The RPA capabilities of Power Automate enable it to create a flow between your Power Virtual Agent and your backend systems. You can design flows where based on a user’s request, the chatbot can trigger an action in the needed backend application.

Learn More: Add actions to a bot using Power Automate

This combination of PVA and PA can solve several common problems enterprises are facing today.

It helps organizations to meet the rising customer and employee expectations at lower costs by combining the automation capabilities of RPA and the self-service features of a chatbot. This also results in increased agent productivity as agents don’t have to spend time on mundane and routine activities like gathering customer data, copying information, completing paperwork, etc.

Some key benefits include:

Improved employee and customer experience
Reduce business costs
Reduced time to complete tasks
Increased employee productivity
Increased competitive advantage

Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate synergistically produce an end-to-end automation that can automatically perform complex operations through natural language commands .

Conclusion

Through PVA and PA, Microsoft has democratised the technology to produce virtual agents and intelligent workflows to professional developers and citizen developers alike. A Power Virtual Agent provides a platform to build enterprise chatbots with minimal coding. Power Automate is a multifaceted RPA platform to automate enterprise-wide repetitive, rules-based tasks. These applications have a simple to use user drag and drop and point-click interface.

PA and PVA complement each others’ functionality. By integrating PVA and PA, you can enable end-to-end automation of processes, streamline workflows, improve agent productivity, improve ROI from your legacy systems and more!

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate helps enterprises in the effective implementation and adoption of the Power Platform.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic please feel free to get in touch with one of our Microsoft and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! appeared first on BotCore.

Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response

Rakesh Reddy — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:43:00 +0000

Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response

As the world continues its struggle amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the onus on staying connected with employees in an increasingly remote work environment is the utmost concern for businesses. They realize that ensuring the health and well-being of their employees is critical to improving the stability and productivity of all business functions, especially in times of crisis and isolation. The need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and stay productive has never been more important.

AI technologies like chatbots are playing a critical role in building a collaborative work environment during the world’s biggest remote working experiment. In addition, to the numerous ways chatbots drive business value e.g service desk management, HR automation, sales support etc., they can be life savers in times of crises.

Microsoft customers looking to accelerate their crisis response strategy should look no further and start implementing Power Virtual Agents – Microsoft’s low-code chatbot builder platform. However, before diving into the potential of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents in times of crises, let’s understand the solution itself.

What is Microsoft Power Virtual Agents?

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents simply put is a platform that enables anyone to build chatbots easily without coding or development experience. In fact, according to Techcrunch, “Microsoft Power Virtual Agents make building chatbots almost as easy as writing Word documents”.

Power Virtual Agents’ low-code interface enables anyone – from a regular business user to an experienced developer – to build and implement chatbots, and minimizes the dependence on IT and technical teams. The Power Virtual Agents platform was developed as part of the Dynamics family of products and was primarily built for customer support use-case. However, the chatbots built using it can be deployed for your internal customers or employees as well.

How can Microsoft Power Virtual Agents Accelerate Crisis Response?

1. Crisis Communication

In times of crisis and uncertainty, employees have several doubts about a variety of topics. Businesses receive a humongous amount of messages at an unprecedented rate through multiple channels. Chatbots built with Power Virtual Agents can answer crisis-related FAQ and deliver critical information across multiple channels – social media, email, IVR, web or mobile chat etc. Repetitive questions related to remote work, public health information, companies policies etc. can be answered instantly 24/7.

Chatbots are essential not only because they answer FAQs of employees, but also for their ability to conduct human-like conversations – something very desirable when people are isolated and going through difficult times.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we’re helping customers deploy the Crisis FAQ chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents.

2. Streamline Internal Processes

As the crisis evolves, your organization might need to modify internal workflows or corporate policies. You might need a new leave management system or modified reporting process or a new cancellation tool. Once you deploy a chatbot using Power Virtual Agents, you can constantly update its skills to facilitate the new workflows. This way you don’t need to have new multiple apps or siloed processes.

3. Improve Productivity

It’s important to ensure your workforce is highly productive when they’re working remotely. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks and HR teams in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in issues and requests. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity. Chatbots act as the first line of support agents to address repetitive and low-value requests. They’re available 24*7 and can handle multiple requests simultaneously. If the chatbot is unable to handle a particular query, it can always hand over the conversation to a human agent.

This will allow your IT staff to focus on productive and proactive tasks. In the same way, your employees don’t have to wait for hours to get their issues resolved.

Learn More:

4. Proactive Communication

Proactively communicate and update your employees about the changes in your company before they seek information – A chatbot lets you schedule alerts and push notifications with which you can keep employees informed about the state of the business. Thereby, you can build employee trust and let them focus on doing their work without worrying about the situation continuously.

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

5. Easier Access To Information

Quick access to information is imperative when employees work remotely. Chatbots built with Power Virtual Agents can be integrated with SharePoint intranets, business intelligence and LOB systems. From there, employees can access the information stored in these systems via natural language conversations with the chatbot. They don’t have to open or switch multiple apps to find information – a chatbot acts as their single point of contact.

Learn More:

Get Started

A chatbot’s range of applications, scalability, and ease of implementation are some key drivers for its adoption amid this crisis. With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, organizations can build and deploy custom chatbots within days. The bots’ capabilities can be constantly updated with the changes in internal process and to solve emerging challenges posed by the pandemic.

We’re helping several organizations leverage Power Virtual Agents to deploy chatbots for crisis management, HR and help desk operations, and remote work support.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot experts for a personalized consultation. We’d also be happy to share our success stories and how we can help you implement Power Virtual Agents effectively.

You might also be interested in our COVID-19 Essential Apps Suite:

The post Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response appeared first on BotCore.

How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 13:16:00 +0000

How To Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, leaving many businesses grappling to adjust to a new normal that is constantly changing. Specifically, extended lockdowns are forcing businesses to implement a long term work-from-home model. In fact, leading tech giants are heading this revolution with most of them allowing their employees to work from home for the rest of 2020 while others are implementing various solutions to ensure limited capacity in their offices. In the case of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the CEO, informed his employees that they can continue working from home “forever”.

Are HR managers prepared for this shift?

As weeks turned into months, it is clear that the adoption of a work-from-home model hasn’t been as seamless as expected for most companies. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, spanning from the lack of collaboration tools to inefficient processes and poor training. HR and IT teams are overburdened with managing requests pouring in from employees working across geographies and time zones.

Given that the effects of the pandemic will continue to impact businesses for a long while to come, HR and other business leaders are realizing the need to invest time and resources into digital transformation and implement solutions that can increase productivity. It’s no surprise that HR digital assistants which were already on the CHRO radar prior to the pandemic, have now become a top priority.

Let’s discuss a few ways companies are leveraging virtual assistants to not only support their remote workforce but also improve HR team productivity during these uncertain times.

Leveraging HR Digital Assistants

Answering FAQ

In the wake of the current crisis, employees will have a variety of concerns regarding the new work-from-home policies, for which they typically turn to the HR department. Addressing these questions takes the HR team’s time away from completing more productive or complex tasks. A digital HR assistant, however, can ensure that your employees are given accurate and thorough answers in real-time. The employees would just have to input their questions in natural language and have their concerns addressed directly, rather than navigating multiple screens or interfaces.

Moreover, with a digital HR assistant, employees will no longer have to wait for a human assistant to get to their question/request and respond back to them and instead get instant responses 24/7. In the event that these questions are too complex for the virtual assistant to answer, the conversation can be transferred to an HR agent.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate is helping customers leverage Power Virtual Agents to deploy customized Crisis FAQ bots to support their remote workforce and answer questions related to work-from-home policies, travel advisories, emergency contact information etc.

Learn More: Acuvate’s Essential Apps Suite For Enterprises In The New Normal

Crisis Communications

The importance of communication during remote working can’t be overstated. Given their availability across different channels and devices, chatbots are a must-have in your crisis communication suite. HR leaders can leverage crisis communication chatbots to

Send public health information to employees from sources like WHO and CDC
Notify employees about company’s new policies, news and advisories
Send work-from-home tips

Recruiting and Onboarding

With social distancing protocols in place, a digital HR assistant can play a major role in ensuring seamless and effortless recruitment and onboarding processes by automating major parts of the process. For instance, businesses can leverage them to filter resumes, track applicants, and schedule online interviews across multiple messaging channels. They can also drive virtual onboarding by enabling remote access to relevant training policies, and materials. You can also automate onboarding processes like filling forms.

Track and support employee health

HR teams can leverage chatbots to track employee well-being by doing regular health status checks. They can also use bots to send safety, disease prevention, social distancing and remote working tips

In fact, Global Telecom, a Filipino telecommunications company, has implemented a chatbot named Digital Usher for Disasters and Emergencies (DUDE) to keep the management updated on its employee’s health and well-being. The chatbot does daily health status checks for its 8000+ employees.

“The insights that we have been receiving from DUDE really give us a good picture of where our employees are at,” said Nico Bambao, Director for Globe’s Employee Experience Team. “When we ask them if they are unwell, they don’t just reply with their symptoms, they tell us if they’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or even feeling lonely or depressed.” (Learn More)

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

Virtual Training Programs

Training playbooks, performance support materials, capability assessments and other learning and development activities can all be carried out within a virtual environment. A virtual assistant can perform these programs autonomously without much involvement from the HR team.

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing how work gets done in an organization. It’s propelling businesses towards an increasingly remote workforce. Consequently, in order to ensure robust internal communications, employee engagement and simplified HR workflows, adopting HR digital assistants is becoming imperative for organizations.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

A Return To Workplace Checklist For HR Leaders

The post How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants appeared first on BotCore.

Why are we excited about Power Virtual Agents?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:30:00 +0000

Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents?

At this year’s Ignite , Microsoft made several announcements related to conversational AI and chatbots. One of the key announcements that caught our attention is the launch of Power Virtual Agents as a part of Microsoft’s citizen development vision of Power Platform.

Power Platform as you know had until now a few powerful tools like Power BI, Power Apps & Flow (now called Power Automate). With the addition of Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft is essentially connecting all their previous investments in these respective technologies. At the same time, addressing the key questions that many customers and partners had been inquisitive about: Where is Microsoft’s bot builder platform?

conversational AI & microsoft

With the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework in early 2016, Microsoft paved the way for customers and vendors alike to start experimenting and developing chatbots. Simply put, Bot framework is an SDK and coupled with the Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services like LUIS and QnA Maker using which developers can build some pretty cool chatbots. However, bot building is yet regarded as technical & complex. To bridge this gap and democratize bot building, solutions like BotCore were developed that put the business analyst or the power user in the driver seat.

With Power Virtual Agents rollout, we are comprehending that all these investments that Microsoft has done since 2016 are all coming together. Not to any wonder, Bot Framework and other cognitive services which are used to enable chatbots forms the foundation of Power Virtual Agents. The building experience is however very simple. This platform doesn’t necessitate an understanding of concepts like intents, utterances, entities etc. which every bot developer and trainer swear by. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!

experiments with power virtual agents

One thing that is true with any chatbot rollout is to fail faster and keep trying. Chatbots can be used to automate a lot of different areas. However, if you choose a use case that happens to complicate the end-user experience or make it difficult for a user to get the job done – your chatbot adoption is at stake!

Once you identify a process or area that can be handled by a chatbot, using Power Virtual Agents, you can quickly create, test and deploy the agent to your users. Call it a PoC or MVP or Pilot or anything else that assures your users that there will be more improvements going forward. This helps you to test the waters before embarking on a larger enterprise-wide journey that would take more time and effort.

areas of employee support within the enterprise

Power Virtual Agents platform was developed as part of the Dynamics family of products and was primarily built for customer support use-case. However, the chatbots built using it can be deployed for your internal customers or employees as well. The whole notion behind chatbots is to offer quick front office or L1 support, effectively eliminating or reducing low-value requests that come into your contact centre or helpdesk.

Few of the areas, where we see Power Virtual Agents being used within the enterprise are:

IT Support
- FAQ
- Self-help and troubleshooting
- Triaging a problem before creating an incident or request in ITSM tools
HR Support
- FAQ
- Automating simpler processes like time-off
- Displaying & validating employee information like contact details etc. from HRIS
Compliance
- FAQ
- Guided dialog conversations to help identify the right action to be taken given a situation
Finance
- FAQ
- Requesting for payroll or benefit related information

integrating power virtual agents with enterprise apps

If you have seen or used Microsoft Flow (Power Automate) before, you are in business! That’s because Power Virtual Agents can seamlessly connect with Power Automate flows to integrate with a wide variety of enterprise applications.

Few examples of integrations that you can use today are:

SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, etc
Dynamics 365
Salesforce
ServiceNow
Freshdesk
Zendesk
Workday HCM
Box
DocuSign
Jira

And many many more…

making power virtual agents accessible to your employees

At the time of this writing, Power Virtual Agents can be deployed on a variety of different messaging applications.

What’s exciting us the most is the ability to launch an agent on Microsoft Teams on the click of a button!

Once you build your agent, you can enable it on Teams and get your pilot group to start using and testing the bot. With any chatbot, the crucial step is to collect lots of feedback from your pilot or early users before you go to a larger audience.

securing your power virtual agents

This part is a bit technical as it does involve some knowledge of Active Directory. However, once you have the configuration in place, you can protect your sensitive data and transactions by ensuring that an employee is properly signed in before the dialogue is executed.

conclusion

With Power Virtual Agents, any enterprise with Office 365 can start building chatbots to automate a wide variety of use cases. Something that was once considered as the complex is now democratized – true to Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and every organization to achieve more.

With this level of proliferation of chatbots within an enterprise, we see that the transition from apps to conversational bots is all set to increase in pace. Many enterprises are using Acuvate’s BotCore for a similar end.

BotCore is a chatbot middleware and aggregation platform that helps customers to build virtual agents and, as well, connect existing bots within a single enterprise persona. Together, Power Virtual Agents and BotCore can aid in an AI-driven Digital Transformation within the enterprise. At Acuvate we are looking forward to automating and solving complex enterprise problems with our customers using Power Virtual Agents!

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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