Customer Consulting Group - Blog #Chatbots

Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate Better Together

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 17:23:19 +1100

In the previous blog of this series, we started with the basics of Power Virtual Agents and we ended up building our very first bot. This post is building on top of that so if you haven't had the chance to read the post, Getting Started with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, we highly recommend you have a look before diving in this one.

In this blog we are going to build a bot that simplifies the requests for annual leave. Our bot "Brian" will ask the user for some basic information such as name, how many days off they are applying for, and for which days. Then our bot will pass that information to Microsoft Power Automate, where we are going to use the Approvals action which will send a request to the HR team to approve or reject the request.

Let's dive in!

First we need to create a topic and specify trigger phrases (have a look at Part 2). Below you can see that I only have four trigger phrases, but this is more than enough for our scenario. Hover just below the Trigger Phrases and press Add Node:

As discussed last time it's a best practice to start with a message. So let's welcome the user and share what type of bot are we. Select Show a message and then introduce your bot (see example below):

Now we are ready to proceed with questions. We can ask the user their name, the number of days they want to take off, and of course the starting date for their annual leave. Hover under the message we just created, and this time select the Ask a question option. You should get the below question template. Now let's start building our question and have a look at a new feature we haven’t yet covered - Variable.

Type your question and under Identify select Person name. The Identify area holds the Entities that the Virtual Agent uses when creating a bot.

Notice that Power Virtual Agent has the ability to store the answers in variables. This is a very useful feature that allows us to use those answers and make the whole bot more interactive and engaging. Click on the pencil and rename the Variable to something more user friendly.

As you can see below, once we clicked on the pencil the Variable properties panel appeared on the right-hand side of the screen and we renamed the variable to Name.

This is how this step should look like after the above edits.

Now repeat the above steps and create a few more questions, one to get the number of days and another to get the starting date. Also, don’t forget to rename your variables to something meaningful. We are going to use them later when building our first Power Automate Flow. Once you are done you should have something similar to the below:

Now that we are ready with the questions, let’s pass them on to our well-trusted Microsoft Power Automate and see how can we leverage the capabilities of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents with flows. You know the drill, add a node under the last question but this time select Call an action.

As you can see we have various Flows there we can use, but let's click on Create a flow to build on from scratch.

When you click on it a separate browser window will pop up and you will be navigated to the Microsoft Power Automate area where will be building our flow. Important here is to understand the Input and Output parameters and how we can use those.

The Input parameters are placeholders where we are going to pass the data coming from the bot and the output parameters are what we are using to pass the data back to the bot.

Let's start by creating an Input parameter corresponding to the questions we asked earlier to the user. We have simply here added three Input parameters for Name of the user, Days requested and the Date to start the annual leave. Once ready click on the plus sign and add an action.

Type Approvals in the search bar and select the Start and Wait for approval action. Approvals is a very popular action and it allows us to create and send approval requests. At the end of the blog you will see how the approval email is structured.

As Approval Type select Approve/Reject - First to respond, for Title we have Annual Leave, but the important ones here are the next two areas. First you want to make sure you populate the Assigned To section. This will define who is responsible for approving this request. Also, another important area to fill is the Details section. It's important to share the information with the approver, making sure they have everything required to make their decision.

Click in the Details section and start typing your message. Notice that we also used variables from the previous step to make the content more dynamic.

Once you click on the Details section you will get the same pop-up as you see in the screen below. Simply type your message and when you need to use dynamic data the only thing you have to do is to click on it and it will show up in the details section (just as shown below):

Finally, give your flow a meaningful name and make sure the Outcome is in the Output parameter.

We are almost there. Now that we have the flow we need to map the Input parameters with our variables and create a Message that will return to the user the outcome from the approval. If you followed the steps above, the mapping should look like the below screenshot:

As a last step create a message and click on the Variables. There you can select the Outcome variable which was just returned back from the flow.

Once this is done we are ready to test the flow. Go to your test bot and write a trigger phrase:

This is how the approval email looks:

Testing the flow we can see that it works nicely and it returns the approval for our day off request bac to the bot.

As a final tip when working with variables remember to always check the Topic Variable Values, which nicely summarises all the values we passed to variables while chatting to the bot.

This is all for today, we hope that you enjoyed the blog. As we are going deeper now and investigate many new areas you will realise that Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is much stronger when combined with Microsoft Power Automate capabilities. Reach out if you have any questions!

Getting Started with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 13:35:07 +1100

Introduction

In this blog we will have a look at Microsoft Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and help you get started with creating your first bot. But before we go any further let's have a look at what Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is and how it can help your business create a better user experience for your staff and customers.

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is the latest addition to the low code suite of products within Microsoft Power Platform. PVA is a low code solution allowing you to build bots which can be used for internal or external use cases. As we will see later in this blog, PVA allows business users to create bots without knowing or writing any code. However, developers and citizen developers can also have a play with it and extend bot capabilities with Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Azure Bot Framework. PVA gives you the ability to publish your bot to multiple channels such as your company website, Microsoft Teams and much more. It is considered a great support tool for customer service scenarios where it can collaborate with human agents and can resolve cases faster while removing the burden from the customer service agent.

Where can you use a bot

Bots can be used to make FAQs more interesting - employees or customers can simply ask their questions and get answers.
Searching for answer in knowledge base articles or Company Policies can be a time consuming exercise, now with bots this process can be far more engaging for the end user. Usually departments such as Human Resources or Legal are getting many questions as users might find it hard to find the right answer. In those cases utilising bots can free up time but also give us the Business Intelligence we need to improve the process. For example, knowing the commonly asked questions (e.g. questions related to payroll, annual leave, maternity or paternity policies) will allow those departments to be proactive in communicating that material to employees.
In retail scenarios we can have customers asking about product availability, prices or even delivery dates.
In manufacturing, a popular use case is searching for spare parts, where in the warehouse are they located, how many of those items are currently available etc.
Customer Service scenarios are also really common for bots. Giving the ability to our customers to ask about the products they bought, raise tickets, check the progress for those tickets and much more.

Navigation

Before we jump on to build our first bot, let us have a look around the platform and understand better what PVA has to offer.

Topics

Topics is literally the brain of PVA, they are the way we train and enrich our bot. As you can see in the image below I have been playing around with my test bot. We started with saying "Hi there" and the bot recognised that it was a "Greeting" it went to the respective topic (see also in the image below) and retrieved an answer, which was eventually displayed to the end user. However, when we asked the bot "what is your name?" the bot couldn’t find an answer, simply because we haven't trained it to know how to answer this type of question.

Entities

Another great way to educate further your bot is by utilising Entities. Entities allow your bot to become more familiar in understanding natural languages and in essence they allow the bot to understand the real intent of a user. By using entities our bot has the ability to pick up valuable information when chatting with a user. For example our bot has the ability to understand that "red" is a "colour" and use that information later on in its conversation with the user.

Analytics

PVA comes with a very strong Business Intelligence tool based on Microsoft PowerBI (another product in the Microsoft Power Platform suite). Although our dashboard is empty at this point in time, we will come back here later on to investigate how we can further enhance our bot in order to improve customer satisfaction. At this point in time we suggest you simply check the tabs within the Analytics area and familiarise yourself with what is available.

Publish

Publish gives you the ability to deploy your bot and make it available to the public. A nice way to test your bot and see it in action is the "demo website" option as you can see below in the image. We will dive into this area in a future blog but for now we suggest you click on the channels and see where you can potentially deploy your bot.

Manage Section

In the Manage section you will find some more advanced areas for your bot. For now we won't touch this area so if you like just navigate around to get familiar and we will come back to this later on.

Let's Get Started

Enough with the navigation, let's get started with building our very first bot. As this is our first blog in the PVA blog series we will start with a relatively simple scenario. We will be creating a "Company Policies" bot which will be helping users to check their annual leave allowance. An important point here is that we are more focused in this blog to help you get familiar with Power Virtual Agents and not actually building a fully scaled bot.

Click on the Bots Panel and then click on New Bot.

In the pop up that will appear give your bot a name, select a language and of course choose the environment where you want it to be deployed.

Once you click on create, PVA will go and start setting up your bot.

Now let's navigate to Topics and create one "From blank"

Here we simply add the triggering phrases. Those will help our bot identify the topic of conversation with the user. Once ready click on the "Go to authoring canvas" and we will continue building our bot from there.

The authoring is probably the most interesting and satisfying area to work in while building your bot. It shows a logical flow on how the conversation with the user will unfold. Hover around and see how you can add and delete steps, ask questions, call actions, navigate to other topics and eventually end the conversation.

Let's start with populating the welcome message to the user as shown below. Once you've done that click on the plus sign just below the message.

Pressing the + button gives us further options on how to proceed. In this scenario let's ask the user about the type of policy we need to provide information about. So click on "ask a question".

In the below scenario we are simply asking the user a question about what type of policy we should provide information about. As you can see below, PVA automatically creates a branch for each of the possible answers we are expecting.

Note: That for this scenario we selected the "Multiple choice options" and provided those options below. In a real-life policy scenario you might have chosen another approach such as creating an entity with all possible leave options which, as we mentioned above will allow PVA to recognise that information more easily while in conversation with the user.

Now we are going to press on the + button under each condition and select the response we would like the user to get in each case. For this step go to each of the above conditions and add a simple message step with the number of days the user is entitled for each of the leave types.

Finally, we are going to end the conversation with the user by clicking on the plus button under each message and pick "end the conversation" --> "end with survey". As you can see there is an option also to transfer this chat to a human agent who can pick it up to resolve any further queries. This typically happens in scenarios when the case should be escalated.

Instead of having a separate end step for each one of your final messages, you can hover over the small circle highlighted below and connect all message steps to a one "end conversation" step.

Eventually, your authoring canvas should look like the one in the image below. Now let's save the bot and test.

On the upper right corner of your screen you will find the Save button. Note that PVA also comes with a Topic Checker to help you improve the quality of your bot. Once saved, click on "Test Bot".

Once you click on it, you will notice the test bot popping out on the left side of the screen. Start by saying "hi" or directly go to the conversation about the annual leave policy. The great thing about this is that you can see the path your conversation is following while you are chatting to the bot. Eventually, you will see all the steps that you follow while chatting to the bot marked as green. This visualisation feature helps designers to improve the flow of the bot and make it more user friendly.

Conclusion

That's all for now; we hope you found this post informative and easy to follow. As you can see, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is an extremely user friendly platform allowing users to build bots without writing code. In the next blog in this series we will discuss how we can publish those bots via channels, leverage Microsoft Power Automate and access our database to create a tailored user experience. Feel free to reach out if you are interested to learn more about this or you have scenarios you want to discuss. Till next time.