Power Virtual Agents is a no-code chatbot building solution. It’s part of Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform business technology suite.
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents
What Is Power Virtual Agents?
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a software application used to simulate human conversation with users through a text interface. In recent years, chatbots have become an increasingly popular way to optimize response times and reduce customer support requests. Chatbots make it possible to immediately engage with online customers without the limitations of business hours or customer volume via automated prompts and answers to common questions or requests for information. By mimicking the patterns of human speech, they offer more intuitive and engaging user interactions than previously possible through hardcoded automation.
The chatbot market was valued at USD 17.17 billion in 2020, and it is projected to reach USD 102.29 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 34.75% over the forecast period, 2021 - 2026.
- “Chatbot Market – Growth, Trends, Covid Impact, and Forecasts (2021 – 2026)” Mordor Intelligence
According to an MIT Technology Review survey, almost 90% of companies that employed AI-powered chatbots saw faster complaint resolution.
Key Product Features
No-code chatbot building
Like all Microsoft Power Platform applications, Power Virtual Agents (or PVA for short) was made with ease of use in mind. The no-code interface makes it possible for non-developer team members to design chatbots to meet their department’s needs.
Interested in adding more complex capabilities? Consider Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services and Bot Framework.
Teams Integration
PVA isn't just for answering prospect or customer requests: employees can also benefit from chatbots designed for internal use. The convenient Power Virtual Agents app for Microsoft Teams enables orgs to embed PVA directly in Teams so it's easy for employees to ask and answer questions from within the popular user interface.
Hundreds of pre-built connectors
Like all Power Platform business tools, Power Virtual Agents comes with hundreds for pre-built connectors. Extend the functionality of your chatbots by connecting them not only with other Microsoft products like SharePoint, but also Twitter, ServiceNow, PagerDuty and more.
Interested integrating Power Virtual Agents to a custom application or solution without a pre-built connector? Our consultants can help. Get in touch with an Altriva Power Platform expert.
Chatbot Analytics
Use analytics to monitor the effectiveness of your chatbots and make improvements. Understand where users are disengaging and which chatbots are most successful at resolving tickets.
Chatbot Topic Suggestions
Power Virtual Agents can use AI to extract content directly from a webpage (e.g., FAQs), making it quick and easy to create a PVA chatbot from existing content and documentation.
Ways to use Power Virtual Agents at Your Organization
Customer Service
Automated ticket creation
A Power Virtual Agents chatbot can collect relevant information for ticket creation and automatically route tickets to the appropriate agent. This reduces service agent time, customer frustration over wait times, and the business costs of a phone conversation to gather the same info.
Answers to common questions
Most customer service organizations find themselves needing to resolve the same issues repeatedly. Power Virtual Agents can be created to handle those requests so talking to a live agent is not necessary. The AI capability can review incoming conversations to suggest topics that either need to be created or to improve existing. This gets to the resolution faster which increases customer satisfaction and allows customer service agents to focus on more complex support tickets.
Human Resources
Onboarding
Use Power Virtual Agents to assist with new employee onboarding and answering frequently asked questions about the company or employee benefits.
IT Support
Faster ticket resolution
Use Power Virtual Agents to help diagnose common problems, route tickets to the appropriate support agents, and handle simple tasks such as password resets and notifying admins of access approval requests.
Proactive Hardware Maintenance
If your networking hardware is IoT enabled, Power Virtual Agents can be used to monitor those assets, create a ticket if something needs to be fixed, and then give techs guidance on solving the issue.
Sales
Use Power Virtual Agents to quickly engage with and respond to leads. Power Virtual Agents can answer common prospect questions and streamline their transfer to the right salesperson, removing barriers to conversion.
Interested in finding out more about Power Virtual Agents or extending its capabilities? Take a look at Microsoft’s documentation or talk to one of our experts.
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