Microsoft simplifies Teams Chatbots with Power Virtual Agents

Chatbots in Microsoft Teams are not a new thing. And while the Chatbots are very useful for enterprises using them for inside help and information for their employees or for their clients.

However, they were not so easy to create and manage. That’s about to change soon because Microsoft partnered with the newest component of the Power Platform, the Power Virtual Agents, a low-code chatbot platform.

Power Virtual Agents help enterprises and developers creating Chatbots easier

Power Virtual Agents is a chatbot service that was built on the Microsoft Power platform and the Bot Framework.

According to Microsoft, the Power Virtual Agent development is a lot easier, because it uses a guided, no-code, graphical interface approach. 

That makes it simple for everyone to create and maintain an intelligent virtual agent without learning to code.

You will be able to create your chatbot in the Power Virtual Agents portal, and afterward, you will be able to integrate it with Microsoft Teams just by pressing a single button.

 If you’re a developer, Microsoft also published the documentation on how exactly to create the chatbot.

How does the Microsoft Teams Chatbot works?

Michael Chow, Senior Program Manager for Microsoft describes an actual example of usage in a blog post:

An employee who has just joined Contoso asks a few questions related to office reopening, new employee orientation, and uploading documentation.

Then, he moves on to ask for support with special accommodations, specifically ergonomic furniture. The bot needs to connect him with an HR expert to understand the situation better.

The bot gathers some information to create a request ticket and submits it to the Onboarding channel in Teams where HR experts can see the request and handle it.

Since there is a longer than normal wait time today, the employee checks his request status with the bot to make sure it is still active.

An onboarding expert sees the notification in the Expert assistance channel in Teams and reaches out to the employee. After helping the employee out, he returns to the Expert channel and closes the ticket.

The employee can also check the status of his requests again and confirm that it has been closed.

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