Power Virtual Agents is a mechanism for creating user interfaces in business applications within Microsoft. As it’s built on top of Power Platform, whatever data you save is stored on the Power Platform’s CDS, which are integrated with thousands of connectors using the Power Automate.
Hence, when you want to take an action on behalf of a customer with a chatbot, that invokes the power automate and connects to F&O or other available connectors.
Furthermore, it is developed on top of Bot Framework, granting Power Virtual Agents with access to all the channels which are available for Bot Framework. Meaning, you can use Power Virtual Agents through different channels like web chat, teams, and many many others.
Let’s look at a few use cases for where virtual agents can be applied to.
Commerce Chat with Power Virtual Agents
One of the biggest use cases for Power Virtual Agents would be E-commerce industry, as that’s the space where companies can embed chatbots from Power Virtual Agents for users, providing them with a flawless chat experience. Furthermore, such chats can be configured to launch at a specific time or specific trigger point.
For instance, if you don’t want to expose the chat on your website, you can do that on specific pages; or when a user is moving between specific pages; or once a certain number of visits to a page has been reached. Furthermore, you can customize and/or chats based on visitor’s location.
Also, Power Virtual Agents has the ability to trigger specific topics so the visitor can be addressed with the right topic immediately.
Similarly, when you trigger proactive chat, you actually want the specific topic to be triggered.
For example, let’s say a user has a $400 cart and there is a free shipping offer is available with $450+ carts. In such scenario, you could trigger a “free shipping” topic for a user to review providing an offer to add some more products and enjoy the free shipping perk.
Procure to Pay
Procure to Pay is one of the big scenarios. So right from when an employee raises our acquisition to all the way when actual payment lines, there are cases in procure to pay where the virtual agent can play a big role.
It could be a virtual agent that’s facing, then an employee who’s helping them to find out where the requisition is. Or it could be a virtual agent facing the vendors.
Employee Chat Bot
A lot of organizations have an employee self-service portal, which can be a part of F&O or you can build an external one. Virtual Agents can be embedded and become a part of teams channel. In this case, a virtual agent chatbot embeds into teams, dealing with different questions related to HR, procurement, benefits, T&E, and so on.
Vendor Facing Chat Bot
If you have a vendor portal or a vendor collaboration portal, you can expose a Power Virtual Agents’ chatbot. It can answer questions on various topics that are related to vendors, i.e. onboarding, terms, good receipts, invoice matching and so on.
