Beginners Guide to Power Virtual Agents /

Beginners Guide to Power Virtual Agents

CATEGORY power virtual agents

DATE Aug 20, 2021

READING TIME

4 min

AUTHOR Laith Adel

One of the key artificial intelligence technologies that is becoming increasingly popular are chatbots. But building chatbots is no easy feat, often requiring the expertise of experienced programmers and AI teams. Microsoft has made your chatbot-building dreams easier than ever with Power Virtual Agents. This is your guide to Power Virtual Agents! We’ll walk you through what they do, how they works, and the top 4 reasons why your business needs it!

What are Power Virtual Agents?

Power Virtual Agents is a service within Microsoft Power Platform suite. It focuses on enabling the easy development and management of fully functional bots through a no code approach. With a graphical, easy-to-use interface, it allows users with virtually zero programming or AI experience to build smart bots.

Additionally, Power Virtual Agents specialise in integration. This means you can tap into all Microsoft 365 apps and external data sources through Microsoft connectors. This means that smart bots can be fully integrated to your workflows and platforms with minimal barriers and restrictions. Naturally, this facilitates for the automation of activities across the breadth of the businesses activities.

How do Power Virtual Agents work?

We tend to think of bots as all knowing technological gods that can pull an answer out of thin air. The reality is that bots are a chain of responses that is triggered based on the data that is input. Think of it as a choose your own adventure game. Just like each choice you make in that book leads to a specific set of additional questions until you reach the intended end goal. Now accelerate that process to lightning speeds and you get the almost instantaneous responses of smart chatbots today.

Building bots can be tedious but they have never been easier with Power Virtual Agents. The easy-to-use interface allows you to create straightforward and simple flows to answer questions easily. Power Virtual Agents help you get started through their pre-made topic categories in their suggested flows. You can easily edit to your needs from watching a quick video tutorial. From that basis, you can build your own chatbot.

Top 4 Business Benefits of Power Virtual Agents

1. Easy to build, measure and improve

The no-code graphic interface makes building a chatbot possible even with zero programming, coding or artificial intelligence experience. To begin with, there is an extensive community with bot-building insights. However, within the Power Platform, the Agents include intutive in-build suggestions which help users navigate the capabilities of the platform. Additionally, intuitive dashboards allow users to easily monitor and continuously improve their chatbots through data-driven insights and AI.

2. Reduces costs

By automating common inquiries both internally and externally, chatbots help free up human agent time for more complex and value adding activities within the business. Additionally, chatbots are less likely to make mistakes which also reduces costs in the long term.

3. Improves customer satisfaction

We all hate being put on hold for hours with horrible elevator tunes playing. With chatbots, you can answer and resolve customer issues 24/7. Customers also feel more empowered as they get their answers through a ‘self-help’ format.

4. Integrates and automates process across the business

Power Virtual Agents integrates seamlessly with everyday products and services through hundreds of inbuilt connectors, allowing users to deploy their chatbots across their websites, social media, Microsoft apps and more with ease. Additionally, it can also build custom workflows to integrate your chatbots with Power Automate as well as tap into more complex scenarios with Microsoft Bot Framework.

We can Guide You through Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agent is a premium Microsoft 365 application and currently runs at a base price of $1000 per month for 2000 sessions. Additional session additions can be purchased if required. On its own, this may sound like a hefty price, but Power Virtual Agents is best optimised when used in tandem with the entire Microsoft Power Platform suite.

Lucky for you, our PPM experts are Power Platform Pros! Book in a chat with our PPM experts to see how you can make the most of Power Virtual Agents and the Power Platform for your business. If you want to learn more about these tools, make sure to read our comprehensive guide to Microsoft Power Platform.

IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace

Introduce Integrate Replace

Step 01

Introduce

You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.

Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.

Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.

A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.

Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.

Step 02

Integrate

The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.

Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.

Direction 01

Enterprise systems

Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.

Direction 02

The tools PMs already use

The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.

The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.

Step 03

Replace

Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.

Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.

Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.

A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.

Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.

The payoff

You stop producing reports and start reading them

Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.

That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.

Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.

pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.