4 Remarkable Ways To Use Power Virtual Agents In Your Business

For a business, it’s essential to optimise the process and increase employee productivity. Also, what goes around comes around, increasing productivity would also eventually result in the gain of business in terms of time and money. There are excellent examples of using Power Virtual Agents (PVA) in your business to increase productivity and ROI (Return on Investment).

The study "The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents", conducted by Forrester Consulting, talks about an organisation with 10,000 employees can expect an overall ROI of 261% with an ability to meet increased demands without increasing employee headcount saving $1 million over three years. Learn more about this in the Microsoft blog post or watch this webinar. 

This blog will look at some great examples of using Power Virtual Agents in your business to increase productivity and efficiency.

Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) is one of the leading tools for collaboration and sharing, used across many organisations. Power Virtual Agents helps you build conversational bots with integration points, AI and cognitive skills. Combining MS Teams and Power Virtual Agents can do many automation wonders. Let’s look at some examples of using Power Virtual Agent in your organisation within MS Teams.

A fascinating article Workers Are Bad at Filling Out Timesheets, and It Costs Billions a Day in Harvard Business Review by Gretchen Gavett discusses the time sheeting issues. Below is a quote from the article.

Taking into account the size of the professional services sector, the company estimates that the U.S. economy is losing 50 million hours, or $7.4 billion a day, in productivity

If you look at the conclusion of the article, it sums up why we need to make it easier for the employees to do their timesheets.

So, the idea is to deploy a bot in MS Teams using Power Virtual Agents that is integrated with the business time sheeting application. It will make an employee’s life so easy to submit timesheets. All users need to do is chat with the bot within the MS Teams to submit a timesheet. No logging into a separate desktop or web-based application to submit the time sheet. At the end of the day, your timesheet is just a chat away.

A high-level architecture diagram of the idea is shown below.

Every department or squad in an organisation has a long list of frequently asked questions. Employees keep asking for links and information using chat or emails from their co-workers, managers, or leadership team.

 
What if we deploy a conversational bot using Power Virtual Agents in the MS Teams to search for these FAQs and business knowledgebase. As a first step, users will ask the bot about what they are looking for, and the bot will bring back the answers from the company FAQ list or an article from the business knowledge base.

 
So no more struggling to find the information you need or looking into the knowledge base and searching for the info. Ask the bot, and it will bring the right results for you within MS Teams. All you need to do is chat with a bot.

The figure below illustrates the idea at a high level.
 

No need to write approval emails or log into a separate system to submit your leave request. Build a leave bot, integrate it with the business leave management software and deploy it in your MS Teams. Doing so removes the hassle and makes the leave process as simple as chatting with your manager.

 
The figure below elaborates the idea of submitting your timesheets from MS Teams.
 

Applications of Power Virtual Agents are not just limited to MS Teams. These bots can be deployed on your website or connected with your social media account like a Facebook business page. To know about where you can deploy and publish your bots, visit this Publish your bot page.

If you are running a business dealing with customer orders, you can use Power Virtual Agents to handle the requests like order information and tracking. Power Virtual Agents can be deployed on your website using the web builder. Not all queries involve complex issues, some customers are just after the basic information about their orders.

 
You can create a bot using the web-based editor and deploy it on your site. After deploying the bot on the site, the bot can handle all the requests customer requests as first-level support. Power Virtual Agents can also delegate complex queries to the available customer service representatives.

You can deploy the same bot to Facebook Messenger if your business runs a Facebook page. Rather than visiting the business site, customer can send their queries via the messenger app, and the bot will respond to all your queries.

Add bot to Facebook is a detailed guide on publishing your bot to a Facebook messenger.

GIF below illustrates the flow behind the idea
 

Every success story or achievement starts with an idea. Power Virtual Agent has made many success stories around the globe and significantly impacted businesses.

One of them is the story about The Miami Dolphins, they created a chatbot that has handled 40,000 conversations with fans, resolving 97 percent of enquiries while increasing customer satisfaction. Visit Microsoft Customer Stories to see how other businesses are using automation and gaining efficiency and productivity in their ways of working.

Reach out and book a free consultation with our experts to bring your ideas to life.