The post Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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!
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?
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.
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.
Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate synergistically produce an end-to-end automation that can automatically perform complex operations through natural language commands .
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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]]>The post Improve Employee training and Engagement with Knowledge Bots appeared first on BotCore.
]]>Rapidly increasing digitization and the emergence of hybrid working practices have resulted in a permanent shift in the kind of experiences employees expect at the workplace. Just as modern-day customers want faster, more meaningful and personalized brand engagement, employees have come to value and like rich, contextual interactions based on their behavior and changing expectations at work.
The new-age employee experience (EX) warrants technology as a vital enabler to augment and enhance critical touch points right from “hire to retire.” In short, designing modern EX entails mixing digital components with the human touch.
That’s where conversational AI has come to play a significant role. AI-based conversational applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, also known as knowledge bots in this context, have rapidly gained traction as a key facilitator of the “employee-first” approach that most organizations have adopted to create a more committed, engaged, and motivated workforce.
Employee knowledge bots offer a guided chat interface and the ability to ask ad-hoc questions to automate simple and complex employee tasks, answer FAQs, and retrieve relevant information for employees.
Powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, such employee engagement chatbots enable employees to increase efficiency, save time, and focus on more productive work that demands higher attention. It is anticipated that by the end of this year, 70% of white-collar workers will have daily interactions with conversational AI platforms.
Easy-to-navigate and well-designed chatbot services have the ability to deliver high-quality human-like interactions, improve employee training and engagement at all levels, and help design effective employee experience strategies.
Let’s explore more.
Streamlined and more personalized employee engagement enriches EX, makes jobs easier, and allows organizations to better address employee needs.
Whether it’s recruitment, engagement, training, collaboration, or support, conversational chatbots play a critical role in re-thinking and re-designing employee experience to focus on improving employee engagement and increasing self-service at a broad level through four critical functionalities:
Looking at the role of employee knowledge bots in personalizing engagement and enriching employee experience through a functional/departmental lens:
Organizations with a very large workforce struggle with managing the thousands of HR-related queries and tickets generated everyday, along with maintaining human-level interactions with each member of the workforce. Moreover, they must try to reduce cost per contact while ensuring employee engagement and HR efficiency is at its peak. With a majority of the workforce operating from remote locations, it is time to bring all HR-related functions, including onboarding processes, learning and development, etc., at employees’ fingertips.
That’s where we can use Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to quickly develop an HR bot for you.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate uses Power Virtual Agents to accelerate the delivery of HR bot solutions that help customers solve HR-related business challenges faster. For example, with more than 1500 employees worldwide, Neptune Energy, an independent oil and gas exploration and production company, wanted a one-stop-solution for all HR-related queries such as terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, HR policies, and offshore employee guidance. Within two weeks, built with PVA and Power Automate, Acuvate launched the HR Handbook Bot for Neptune’s Employee Experience Digital Platform.
Delving deeper into the use cases, we see that an HR bot serves the following purposes:
Acuvate helped a Dutch British Consumer Goods company build an all-encompassing digital assistant to address routine queries for various departments, including IT, HR, logistics, and finance, for 160k+ workforce. The bot resulted in 47% time savings in getting answers to regular HR/IT queries, 30% increase in CSAT, and 40% reduction in cases.
Acuvate helped a major oil and gas conglomerate spin up a knowledge capture assistant quickly, to maintain the tacit knowledge base of the organization. Geoscientists possess a wealth of knowledge that they gather, interpret, and convert to meaningful insights. To preserve this knowledge even if one employee needs, geoscientists must manually capture and store the data, which can be highly tedious, error-prone, and may make discoverability of knowledge difficult. This process was made quicker and accurate with a knowledge capture assistant that could capture text, notes, and links with real-time voice input, convert geological terms into text, tag transcripts with relevant keywords, and make knowledge search and management a breeze.
Growing digitalization has significantly increased the dependence on digital solutions and apps for everyday work. Consequently, the staff is constantly looking for help on various IT-related queries. While this has put tremendous pressure on IT helpdesks, failure to receive timely assistance hampers employee productivity and efficiency.
IT bots developed and deployed quickly using Power Virtual Agents can address routine queries and IT issues, and help with the following:
Acuvate helped a client build an intelligent IT helpdesk chatbot to enable self-service support, answer IT-related FAQs, and help employees authenticate and resolve their queries using a guided conversation experience. The bot also integrated with the company’s ITSM tool to auto-create incidents upon the user’s request.
To maintain competitiveness, make critical business decision, and stay up to speed with how the business is faring, business leaders need instant access to critical KPIs, metrics, and business insights. BI bots help executives access data-driven insights and make business-decisions in a quick, cost-effective manner.
Acuvate built a Data chatbot for a government agency responsible for supplying water to one of the largest municipalities in the USA. The chatbot was able to provide insights related to contracts, payments, vendors based on the natural language questions. Not just that, the unique feature of this data bot is that it can surface relevant visuals from Power BI on the chatbot itself so that users need not login to Power BI separately to view the visuals and drill down charts to find more info. All this can be done on the chatbot itself.
Due to the 24/7 access to real-time data with zero dependency on devices and portals, the client was able to achieve 90% reduction in invoice processing times and reduce cycle times for orders drastically.
At Acuvate, we help clients strengthen their employee experience strategy by building and deploying employee knowledge bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, our chatbot services leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and NLP frameworks, including Azure Cognitive Services, the Microsoft Bot Framework, and LUIS.
Furthermore, keeping in mind our customers’ strong interest in building & deploying chatbots quickly, we leverage Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Microsoft’s Azure services extensively to roll-out chatbot solutions with lesser time-to-market and help customers solve business challenges faster.
Along with their multilingual functionality, our employee engagement chatbots support popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.), thus helping clients to engage a globally dispersed workforce.
To explore more about knowledge bots, schedule a personalized consultation with our BotCore experts.
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]]>The post How are chatbots transforming the oil and gas industry appeared first on BotCore.
]]>While oil and gas (O&G) is one of the most valuable commodities, the industry witnessed a severe slump in demand amidst movement restrictions and social and economic challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with the O&G market on its way to recovery, leading players are looking for methods to increase efficiencies in every aspect of the supply chain, maximize production, and enhance revenue.
Oil and gas companies are exploring new ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and digitize processes, increase productivity, and solve complex and straightforward engineering challenges.
According to research by Mordor Intelligence, “The global AI in Oil and Gas market was valued at USD 2,040.89 million in 2019, and it is expected to reach a value of USD 3,349.89 million by 2026 while registering a CAGR of 10.14% year-on-year.”
AI chatbots, in particular, are aiding O&G companies in their relentless pursuit of transforming operations in both upstream and downstream activities.
Let’s explore further.
Upstream oil and gas companies, also known as exploration and production companies, identify deposits, drill wells, and extract raw materials from underground.
AI chatbots help meet the specific needs of upstream oil and gas companies. Some of the use cases include –
AI chatbots help workers in the field ask questions, access real-time information, and call for help in case of an emergency, within minutes and without having to stop what they were initially doing.
The chatbot connects to the company’s external and internal sources to quickly fetch information such as lube specifications, average reservoir porosity, details around faults, etc.
Additionally, voice-enabled bots can answer questions and provide status reports to operators as they move from one place to another.
An AI chatbot can receive unstructured inputs from workers currently performing maintenance on the field. It can then analyze these issues and offer real-time solutions, basis an extensive archive of expertise and insight.
AI chatbots maintain an extensive repository of information about processes that can prove valuable for new hires.
Moreover, they can help reduce the time spent on the collection, interpretation, and simulation of data. The bot can leverage the company’s software programs to help workers prioritize infill drilling locations, find optimal well spacing, build type curves, and much more.
The oil and gas industry is prone to various upstream issues, such as problems in pipelines and drilling, oil spills, health and safety hazards, etc. For example, a defect in the production line can cause severe damages and result in the loss of millions in revenue.
When used properly, AI chatbots can alert users about events with potentially catastrophic consequences and suggest appropriate solutions.
Downstream oil and gas production is related to activities post the production of crude oil and natural gas.
Downstream O&G players are closer to the end consumer. With their natural language abilities, AI chatbots can answer customer queries, provide product information, and make tailored product suggestions.
Take the following example.
Shell Lubricants launched the first AI chatbot for B2B customers called LubeChat. LubeChat allows customers to find the best products for their equipment and the closest authorized dealers. Users can also ask questions about physical characteristics and specifications of the lubes and lube testing.
Let’s take another example.
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL) launched an AI-enabled chatbot, “Urja,” to provide its customers a seamless self-service portal to get their queries resolved. Trained in more than 600 use cases, the chatbot offers services like LPG booking, price and payment status, the delivery status of booked LPG cylinder, and refill history. Moreover, users can update mobile numbers, change LPG distributors, request mechanic services, locate the nearest petrol pump, and seek doorstep delivery of fuel. Urja now speaks in 13 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Gujarati, Marathi, and Urdu.
The above cases are just a few examples of how chatbots play a pivotal role in customer-facing downstream oil and gas business activities.
At Acuvate, we help clients in the oil and gas (O&G) industry deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.
BotCore’s minimal coding requirements and graphical design interface allow enterprises to build and deploy chatbots within a few weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build intelligent bots that can cater to both employees and end-users.
Our bots can be deployed on several channels and support multiple languages, including French, German, Italian, English, and many more.
Additionally, we use Microsoft’s low-code, graphical interface bot-building solution Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to help clients build rich, conversational bots quickly – without the need for extensive coding knowledge.
To know more about BotCore and PVA, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
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]]>The post Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success appeared first on BotCore.
]]>Today, AI-enabled chatbots play a significant role in addressing both simple and complex queries of users. Statistics show that 3 in 5 millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. In fact, teams that use chatbots to automate conversations are 27% more likely to meet rising customer expectations than those that don’t.
Moreover, by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.
While chatbots act as the first line of support, there will be situations when the conversation needs to be handed off to a human agent.
Microsoft customers using Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to build employee/customer-facing chatbots can explore the human agent hand-off functionality for better success.
But, what is PVA? Power Virtual Agents is a low-code app development SaaS platform that allows pro and citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots in a guided, no-code visual interface quickly.
Before delving deep into the nuances of handing over conversations to human agents using PVA, let’s understand why a human-in-the-loop is important?
Chatbots help organizations automate customer and employee support – 24X7, at scale, and at significantly lower costs. They enhance efficiency and productivity and allow users to focus on tasks that add business value. Chatbots answer FAQs, send the required information, and provide smart suggestions based on the customer/employee profile.
Meaning, they augment human effort; however, in case of an escalation or upon the user’s request, the bot must be capable of seamlessly transferring the call to a live agent.
Let’s understand why a human-in-the-loop is critical.
At times, the user is angry, frustrated, or annoyed. In such a scenario, the chatbot must be capable of detecting the mood or tonality of the user and handover the chat to an agent.
Sometimes, the subject of the conversation may be sensitive/critical, the customer may be at a higher risk of churning, or it may be a high-value transaction. In such cases, it is prudent for the bot to hand over the chat to a human agent.
Customer queries are diverse and evolving. At times, the chatbot may not be able to handle them and should recommend the “Chat with an agent” option.
Users may be in a rush or prefer to talk to a live agent instead of a bot.
Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture
Gartner
A chatbot needs a human-in-the-loop feedback system to constantly learn and become intelligent. Both users and agents can influence and improve its intelligence. In the case of consumer-facing chatbot, even the smallest customer’s feedback like “click here if you are satisfied with the solution” can help improve the machine learning algorithm of chatbots. In addition to consumer training, contact center agents can also classify outliers and exceptions and help modify the chatbot training data and behavior accordingly.
Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA) allows you to seamlessly hand over critical conversations to live agents.
Power Virtual Agents is a low-code app development SaaS platform that allows pro and citizen developers alike to build and deploy chatbots in a guided, no-code visual interface quickly.
While PVA is a part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, it leverages the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services to build chatbots and configure human agent handoff.
Learn More: Adding transfer to an agent node
The Microsoft Bot Framework supports two models for integration with agent engagement platforms.
When a bot hands over a conversation to a human agent, it shares the full context as well as user-defined variables to help agents resume the conversation smoothly. Microsoft has defined the contextual variables available upon handoff, which are as follows –
Context | Purpose | Example |
va_Scope | Helps route escalations to a live agent. | “bot” |
va_LastTopic | Helps route escalations to a live agent and helps ramp-up a live agent. Includes the last topic that was triggered by an utterance from the user. | “Return items” |
va_Topics | Helps ramp-up a live agent. | [ “Greetings”, “Store Hours”, “Return Item” ] |
va_LastPhrases | Helps route escalation to a live agent and helps ramp-up a live agent. | “Can I return my item” |
va_Phrases | Helps ramp-up a live agent. | [“Hi”, “When does store open”, “Can I return my item” ] |
va_ConversationId | Helps uniquely identify a bot conversation. | GUID |
va_AgentMessage | Helps ramp-up a live agent. | “Got a gift from: HandoffTest” |
va_BotId | Helps identify the bot that is handing off a conversation. | GUID |
va_Language | Helps route escalation to a live agent. | “en-us” |
All user-defined topic variables | Helps ramp-up a live agent. | @StoreLocation = “Bellevue” |
Additionally, a transcript of the conversation that took place between the customer and the bot is transferred to the live agent.
Learn More: Configure hand off to any generic engagement hub
Learn More: Configure seamless and contextual hand-off to omnichannel for customer service
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate helps clients deploy AI-enabled chatbots with Power Virtual Agents for customer and employee-specific use cases, such as HR support, IT service desk, sales and marketing, etc.
Organizations can then define scenario-specific workflows for seamless transfer to human agents when needed.
To know more about our services, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our Power Virtual Agents experts.
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]]>The post Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 –
To know more about BotCore, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our chatbot experts.
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]]>The post Building A Resilient Customer Service During Uncertain Times appeared first on BotCore.
]]>The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has posed some unprecedented challenges to both public and private organizations. Measures implemented to control the spread of the virus and the impact caused by them have created confusion, uncertainty, and fear amongst consumers.
The immediate need for clarity among customers on a variety of issues, from loan payments to booking flights, from cancellations to insurance claims and mortgage payments, has led to a huge spike in the number of calls received by the contact centers. A majority of customers prefer call support as their initial channel of communication since it allows for greater flexibility and provides a human touch.
Customers want an opportunity to explain, reason or negotiate with contact center agents. Also, they generally prefer to solve urgent issues by calling for support rather than use other channels.
Many organizations across industries are ill-equipped to deal with such a massive increase in call volumes, leading to longer wait-times as the support staff serves other customers.
Adding to the turmoil is the need to comply with social distancing norms that have forced the support staff to shift to a work-from-home setup. Moreover, there is a shortage of service staff as workers fall sick and are unable to report to work.
The pandemic has brought to the forefront the pressing need for businesses to be empathetic towards the needs of their customers while also implementing significant changes in their operational setups.
In times of crisis, a business’s ability to provide quick and compassionate service will enhance its brand value and go a long way in building a loyal customer base.
The obvious question, which then arises is, “How can an organization respond to these challenges?” Let’s find out.
Before delving into the potential solutions, it is imperative to understand the key areas of concern that require swift action by the organizations. These include –
To navigate through the crisis, organizations must modernize their existing IT infrastructure. As a part of this modernization process, our customers and several large enterprises are adopting a myriad of advanced technologies. But the most popular of them are conversational AI and data analytics.
The combination of these technologies is enabling companies to effectively manage the growing demand for customer support, while reducing the burden on the support staff.
While analytics provide insights on the changing customer behaviour, emerging customer issues and common roadblocks in customer service operations, conversational AI can be used to deliver the first line of service and improve agent productivity.
Utilizing data to the fullest has never been more important. In the midst of this volatility, contact centers must utilize data to
This can be done in the following manner –
In addition to these two approaches, analytics can also be used to identify and deflect non-critical calls, requests and contacts to virtual agents or other self-service channels.
Conversational AI is an advanced technology that enables computers to process, understand and respond to text or voice inputs in natural language. Conversational AI platforms can be used to build conversational user interfaces, chatbots and virtual assistants which can be integrated with messaging platforms, social media platforms, SMS, and website chat.
Conversational AI technologies like chatbots and conversational IVR are designed to understand and provide answers to customer queries with minimal agent intervention. They can act as first line of support and improve the productivity of human support staff in the following ways –
Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots
To realize the potential of chatbots completely amid this crisis, organizations must be mindful of a few things –
Learn More:
There are several real-life scenarios where companies have adopted chatbots amid COVID-19 to keep up with the growing customer needs –
Since March, it has assisted 350,000 clients who had trouble meeting their credit card, auto loan and other payment obligations, thereby reducing the call volume to the bank’s contact centres.
The bot has handled more than 20,000 transactions handled monthly and 70% of chats handled have an average handling time of less than 2 minutes. The bot reduced the company’s operational cost by 60%.
We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients to streamline their customer service operations and reduce costs through our chatbot-builder platform called BotCore.
BotCore presents several benefits – (i) it is an intuitive, no-code platform to easily build AI-powered bots, (ii) it is versatile and can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services, (iii) it allows the connection of existing bots across different departments to create a strong digital network, (iv) it is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments, (v) it facilitates the creation of chatbots that can simulate highly complex conversations.
The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation initiatives in different functions of an organization and customer service is no different. To build a resilient customer service and infuse agility in day-to-day operations, organizations must continually evolve and adapt to the changing times. They must revamp their existing IT infrastructures to manage the pandemic-driven needs of the customers.
This response to the crisis is likely to transform the future of customer service forever. Adopting conversational AI and data analytics is a good starting point for organizations looking to transform their operations.
Since it is hard to predict the end of the crisis, organizations must plan both for short-term continuity as well as enabling long-term operational changes.
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.
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]]>The post Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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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:
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]]>The post How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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”.
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.
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.
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, 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
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
Read More: Essential Apps For Enterprises To Fight The COVID-19 Disruption
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.
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
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.
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.
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]]>The post How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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.
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.
Let’s quickly explore the current state of customer service chatbots built with bot frameworks and the limitations associated with them.
Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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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]]>The post Why are we excited about Power Virtual Agents? appeared first on BotCore.
]]>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?
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!
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.
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:
FAQ
Self-help and troubleshooting
Triaging a problem before creating an incident or request in ITSM tools
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
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…
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.
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.
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!
Read more: A Buyer’s Guide To Choosing The Best Chatbot Builder Platform
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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