Benefits of using Power Virtual Agents in a Self-Service Strategy
Customer Service is an integral part of any organisation. According to the Microsoft Global State of Customer Service report, nearly two-thirds of respondents go directly to self-service before engaging with an agent. Examples of self-service features often used by customers are knowledge articles, chatbots, voice bots, and virtual agents. These features are often preferred by customers as they remove the waiting time to speak with agents and can automate a lot of the manual processes that are typically done by agents. In fact, research completed by Gartner predicts that chatbots will become the primary channel for a quarter of organisations by 2027.
With chatbots being an integral part of an organisation’s customer service strategy, it’s useful to understand the various options available. This blog will introduce one such option. Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agent (PVA) is a low-code solution that allows makers to create intelligent bots (chat and voice) which can be easily integrated into a company’s business process.
PVA is a part of the Microsoft Power Platform and integrates natively with other Power Platform solutions e.g., Power Pages and Power Automate.
Some of the key features of Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agent are:
- Easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI): Power Virtual Agent allows bots to be created using a visual interface, without the need for coding. This makes it easy for anyone to create a chatbot, regardless of their technical skills.
- Natural Language Understanding: Power Virtual Agents provides the ability to understand natural language. This means that users can ask questions or make requests in their own words and the bot will understand and react appropriately. Machine Learning is used to improve the understanding of natural language over time, allowing PVA to improve its responses to customer interactions.
- Integration with other systems: Power Virtual Agents can be integrated with other systems to provide personalised responses and trigger automated processes, creating a seamless customer experience.
- Analytics and Reporting: Power Virtual Agent includes several out-of-the-box reports which provide insights on the effectiveness of the bots in use. For example, the bot usage report which tracks the number of users interacting with the chatbot and the percentage of bot conversations completed vs escalated to an agent, or the conversation analytics report which shares the average length of time for each bot to respond and the success rate of each conversation.
Power Virtual Agents as a low code bot solution provide opportunities for companies to both reduce cost to service whilst improving customer satisfaction levels.