Virtual Agents are the conversational chatbots that help many companies provide online customer service. But did you know that virtual agents can help across a huge range of business tasks beyond customer service, engaging both your external customers and internal workforce? That's where Microsoft Power Virtual Agents comes in.

What is Power Virtual Agents?

Power Virtual Agents is the newest addition to Microsoft power platform. It empowers everyone to build versatile, adaptable and intelligent chatbots with no coding or AI expertise required. These chatbots are able to interact and have conversations with users across different sites and applications, and they are able to take actions using the capabilities of power automate, leveraging the best of both worlds.

What's So Unique About Power Virtual Agents Chatbots?

Power Virtual Agents chatbots can help with everything from HR to sales, on almost any site or channel imaginable -- from websites to Microsoft Teams to Facebook to Microsoft Power Apps.

At first glance, Power Virtual Agents' chatbots look and behave like other chatbots you may have seen when looking for a certain kind of customer support. Users ask questions by typing in plain language, just like any real-life conversation, and the chatbot normally replies with a conversational response, hopefully steering the user towards a successful resolution of their issue with just a few messages. What makes Power Virtual Agents so different -- and so powerful -- happening behind the scenes.
Power Virtual Agents can handle the entire chatbot development life cycle, starting from the dialog creation to the deployment of the virtual agent to a channel like Slack, Skype, Teams, etc. This service is also integrated with the other tools within the Microsoft Power Platform such as Power Automate. Based on the user's replies, the virtual agents are capable to trigger any workflow from the Power Automate and get the job done as intended.
In addition to the above, the Power Virtual Agents are also able to leverage the Microsoft LUIS service to enhance the user experience by introducing natural language understand features into the virtual agents. You can also build a FAQ bot by using the QnA Maker and deploy your bots to any channels that you need.
Here's a good example..
A client used Power Virtual Agents to create a personal digital assistant for his employees. This assistant helped with a wide variety of tasks, from onboarding and scheduling to managing benefits and getting IT help. The company's workers juggle many things at once, balancing day-to-day tasks, meetings, projects, and deadlines. But a siloed array of workplace applications -- from communications, to files, to HR solutions -- meant that workers often had a disjointed experience that decreased productivity.
Power Virtual Agents empowered the company to create a single solution that integrated well with their entire ecosystem. With their new digital assistants, workers can now schedule a meeting, update their timecard, make benefit selections, and get employee information -- all from a single chat interface embedded in the employee portal, also available on iOS and Android.
And because it's powered by Power Virtual Agents, the digital assistant is easy to update with new topics and fresh content. There's no need to build and train new models for every new topic being added.
Some other ways that Power Virtual Agents bots have been used include:

• COVID-19 infection rate and tracking information
• Sales help and support issues
• Opening hours and store information
• Employee health and vacation benefits
• Common employee questions for businesses

Core Features and Benefits of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

No code required

Power Virtual Agents is easy and intuitive to use, featuring a visual authoring canvas designed with business people in mind -- the subject matter experts who are closest to the content and answers in your organization. Chatbots are super easy to build using Power Virtual Agents, and you can be up and running with your first chatbot within minutes. Power Virtual Agents makes it simple and straightforward to create, test, and maintain a chatbot all within the same graphical interface.

Empower virtual agents to take action

Integrate Power Virtual Agents with the products and services you use every day using hundreds of prebuilt connectors, by building custom workflows using Power Automate, or creating complex scenarios with Microsoft Bot Framework.

Measure performance

Monitor and continuously improve chatbot performance using AI- and data-driven insights available in an easy-to-read dashboard.

Resolve issues faster and more easily

Quickly create sophisticated, AI-powered chatbots that can resolve common issues and answer questions around the clock. Power Virtual Agents empowers everyone to easily build intelligent chatbots to respond rapidly to customer and employee needs, freeing up staff to focus on complex requests and high-value interactions.
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents means you can spend more time building your content library for virtual agents to help resolve more issues faster -- and less time building the agent.

• Personalize conversations and resolve issues faster
• Without the investment in developers, AI experts, and data scientists
• Applicable to any line-of-business, not just customer service scenarios
• Standalone engine separate from Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Multi Author support

Power Virtual Agents allows multiple users to collaborate and co-author a chatbot together, empowering teams to work together. Team members can work on different topics in parallel, or delegate complex tasks - like adding actions or setting up authentication  -- to team members with different skill sets.

Export and Import:

Administrators can easily manage the chatbot's lifecycle to address change control, governance, data residency, and latency requirements. They can import and export a bot across solutions and environments and stage it for release.

Power Virtual Agent Availability in Saudi Arabia

Power Virtual Agents is available as both a standalone web app, and as a discrete app within Microsoft Teams. Most of the functionality between the two is the same. However, there might be different reasons to choose one version or the other based on the ways you want to use Power Virtual Agents.  All the integration and logics can be implemented in the graphical user interface of the Power Virtual Agents portal.

Start using Power Virtual Agents Today!

Power Virtual Agent is super easy to use, and when it comes to licensing or getting some quick ideas on how to get started putting Power Virtual Agents to work for your organization, Ctelecoms is always there. As a Gold-Certified Microsoft Partner in KSA (Jeddah, Riyadh and Western Saudi Arabia), we have all the expertise to get you up and running in no time.