Power Automate Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:48:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Power Automate Archives - BotCore 32 32 Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! https://botcore.ai/blog/power-virtual-agents-power-automate/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=5917 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 […]

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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.

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]]> Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code https://botcore.ai/blog/low-code-chatbots/ Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:33:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7476 Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the […]

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Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the industry drove up the demand for text and voice-based bots that automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer support.

With the IT department dealing with massive resource scarcity and struggling to develop apps for various business problems, enterprises started looking at smart solutions that allow people with little or no coding knowledge to quickly deploy AI-powered bots for a host of business use cases. No wonder many organizations turned to low-code app development platforms (LCAPs).

Low-code platforms are indeed the future of chatbot development. So, what’s a low-code app development platform? A low-code application platform, or an LCAP, is an interactive platform that leverages a visual interface, such as drag-and-drop tooling and pre-configured templates, to empower users to develop and deploy professional-grade bots within days.

Let’s explore further.

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it’s quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%.

2. Reduces development costs

Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc.

3. Allows flexible integration

Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data.

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a Microsoft software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the low-code app development space. Microsoft’s Cloud services host the application; hence PVA significantly reduces the need for a conducive environment to deploy and maintain the bots.

Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services form the SDK to build chatbots using a guided, no-code visual interface, allowing citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots quickly. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

Read More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a leading low-code chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. Chatfuel supports many languages and allows integration with several third-party apps.
Chatfuel’s built-in guides and predefined bot templates help create bots for automated customer support and sales and marketing activities easily. An analytics dashboard allows users to monitor and analyze several business and chatbot metrics.

3. FlowXO

FlowXO enables users to build both simple and complex AI bots and connect them to more than 100 different cloud apps. FlowXO provides a visual flow editor, supports multilingual chatbots, and allows integration with popular apps, such as Facebook and Slack. Other features include the ability to send emails and attachments and build chatbot widgets for websites.

4. Botsify

Botsify uses an easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build template designs for chatbots. Botsify’s chatbots are used by well-established companies, including Apple and Shazam.

The bots integrate with services, such as WordPress, Alexa, ZenDesk, Google Sheets, etc., and can collate user information, track sales leads, and automate sales chats.

5. BotKit

With a semantic chat interface, BotKit’s chatbots imitate human conversations. The platform boasts interesting features like a visual conversation builder and open source libraries.

Other features include activity monitoring, detailed statistics, and flexible API integrations.

6. TARS

TARS is another low-code bot-building platform that democratizes the process of building chatbots with pre-built templates that are easy to edit and customize.

Other exciting features of the platform include – integration with Zapier, file and image upload, custom branding, API integration, and the option to export data to Excel/CSV.

7. BotCore

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots quickly with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Fully deployable on Microsoft Cloud, BotCore’s graphical interface with drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built templates, and an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes enable professional and citizen developers alike to create and deploy chatbots in a matter of days.

Some of the powerful features of BotCore include –

  • BotCore leverages Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
  • Technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning enable our bots to understand the context, learn from past conversations, and respond to users in a human-like manner.
  • Seamless agent handover capability allows bots to handle simple requests while escalating the more complex ones to human agents when needed.
  • BotCore will enable clients to build multilingual bots that can be deployed across various channels, giving users a seamless omnichannel experience.
  • Our bots can aggregate the best of Microsoft technologies, including LUIS bots, Power Virtual Agents, QnA Maker bots, and other third-party bot applications.

To know more about BotCore, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our chatbot experts.

Further Reading:

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]]> How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service https://botcore.ai/blog/dynamics-365-virtual-agents/ Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:40:49 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=5270 How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service Delivering positive customer experiences has become critical for organizations to drive engagement, purchases, loyalty and retention. To this end, many enterprise leaders have deployed AI customer service technologies like chatbots for various use cases. Several Microsoft customers are already using Bot Framework to build customer […]

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How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service

Delivering positive customer experiences has become critical for organizations to drive engagement, purchases, loyalty and retention. To this end, many enterprise leaders have deployed AI customer service technologies like chatbots for various use cases.

Several Microsoft customers are already using Bot Framework to build customer chatbots. These bots though effective require high coding and more resources. To overcome this, many customers are using Azure-driven low-code chatbot builder platforms like BotCore developed by Acuvate, a Microsoft Gold Partner.

With the launch of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, Microsoft is aiming to supercharge the capabilities of customer service bots and pave the way for a low-code and seamless bot building experience. In this article, we’ll give an overview of this new technology and what it means for Microsoft customers.

What Are Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents?

As the name indicates, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents is a combined package of Microsoft’s two key technologies – Dynamics 365 (Customer Relationship Management Software) and Power Virtual Agents (low-code chatbot builder platform).

If you’re a Microsoft user, you must be familiar with Dynamics 365. With its no-code guided graphical interface, Power Virtual Agents enables business teams to build powerful chatbots quickly and with no developer help. 

It  is also a part of Microsoft’s prestigious Power Platform – a low-code business application platform which brings PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate and Virtual Agents under one umbrella.

As chatbot technology becomes critical in customer service operations, it’s integration with a CRM is a no brainer.  Customer service teams can use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents to easily identify and automate common support issues – without having to write code.

The Need For Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

Let’s quickly explore the current state of customer service chatbots built with bot frameworks and the limitations associated with them.

  • The success of customer service chatbot largely depends on the quality and quantity of the bot’s knowledge – topics it understands and can deliver the right solutions. Customer service experts who actually interact with customers and know their problems are often disconnected from the bot development process due to the high coding most framework-based chatbots today require. This leads to poor bot conversations and customer experience. Empowering customer service teams to create virtual agents by themselves is imperative to success.
  • New requests and queries emerge due to changing market and business conditions. Ex: launch of a new product, roll out of a new product update, etc. This means the chatbot’s content should also be updated. Customer service teams should be provided with the ability to easily update the bot and add new topics without any hassle and long update cycles.
  • Customers can get frustrated if the bot doesn’t understand their intents. A chatbot should be equipped with AI and NLP capabilities that adapt to customer content.
  • Customer service chatbots should extend their capabilities well beyond responding to users – they should be able to perform tasks on behalf of customers. Hence, it’s key to integrate them with backend systems.

Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Help?

The solution provides a proactive workflow for resolving customer issues and a modern approach to customer service. Let’s deep dive into its key features.

1. Discover Issues to automate

With the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights dashboard, you can identify issues which are repetitive, trending and time-consuming for your agents. The AI in the software also provides recommendations on the right issues to automate.

2. Automate support issues with the virtual agent

Once the common support topics and issues to be automated are identified, customer service teams can easily build a virtual agent that’ll automatically address these issues. With a simple no-code graphical interface and ready-to-use templates, agents can build rich conversations within minutes.  If there is no need to build a new virtual agent, human agents can also update the knowledge of an existing chatbot with the same ease.

3. Complete actions on behalf of users

Virtual agents can not only troubleshoot users’ problems by chatting with them but also perform actions on their behalf. By integrating Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, your customer service team can enable a trigger which lets bots to access data or perform tasks in your back-end systems.

4. Human Hand off

When a virtual agent can’t solve an issue or the conversation becomes too complex to handle,  it provides customers an option to “Talk to a human agent”. Once the customer agrees, the virtual agent hands off the conversation to a human agent. 

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots  

5. Monitor Performance with Analytics

Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents comes with an AI-powered analytics dashboard in which you can track topics that are handled, which topics need human handoff and overall performance of the virtual agent. The dashboard continuously provides suggestions on improving service experience and frees up the bandwidth of your agents. 

Business Benefits Of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

The software drives a win-win-win situation for customers, human agents, and management. Customers will get better service experience, agents can focus on productive tasks and management can reduce operating costs. Here are some more benefits:

  1. Increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
  2. 24*7 Self-service
  3. Reduced customer service costs
  4. Improved agent productivity
  5. Personalized service experiences
  6. Increased ROI from back end systems

Pricing

The pricing for the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents package – which includes Power Virtual Agents + Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights starts from $1,100 per tenant/month. This includes

2,000 Power Virtual Agents Sessions and 100,000 Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights cases.

Get Started

Microsoft is coming up with new features for Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents including AI-driven dialogs, multi-lingual support, support for telephony and more! Microsoft customers planning to modernize their customer service should look into implementing this exciting new technology which brings the best of Microsoft innovations – Dynamics 365, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate together. The future of delivering stellar customer experiences depends on the robustness of your service workflow and Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents helps you build a powerful one.

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

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