Microsoft Teams FAQ bot with Power Virtual Agents

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In the current challenging times due to COVID19, there are a wide range of circumstances organisations experience that require communication tools to be created and deployed efficiently to help employees with their remote work needs. This blog post walks you through a Microsoft Teams FAQ bot that is pre-installed by an organization admin to help onboard new employees and support their remote office setup needs.

This bot can help address common questions from employees such as new employee orientation dates.  It can also notify human experts for requests that require human intervention, for example, getting ergonomic furniture for their remote office. The bot is deployed on Microsoft Teams so it is available to everyone in the organization. You can sign up for the Power Virtual Agents trial version to create a bot. This blog walks you through an example with guidance that you can expand for other scenarios. The key goal of this blog is to help you get a Microsoft Teams bot deployed quickly to meet employee needs.

Employee Experience

An employee who has just joined your organisation 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.

Building BOT

Power Virtual Agents passes in parameters from the bot (employee’s name, title, and description) to create a request using the ticket entity.  This utilizes Power Platform’s built-in Common Data Service (CDS) database. The built-in Power Automate CDS connector ‘Create a new record’ action creates a new ticket record in CDS. The request details are filled by using dynamic content passed in from Power Virtual Agents. Once completed, it returns the request ticket reference to the bot for using further down in the conversation.

Now let’s look at the second Power Automate flow that notifies the experts in a Teams channel.   The flow has a parallel branch to allow the bot’s conversation with employee to continue while waiting for an HR expert to close the request.  It uses Power Automate’s.

Once the bot is ready and the author is satisfied with its quality, he can publish the bot with one-click to make the content available to end users. To make the bot discoverable in Teams, generate the Teams app package with the bot’s app ID

Prometix have developed business applications using Power Platform, Power Virtual Agents & MS Teams. Our consultants in Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra have developed Business Intelligence & Artificial Intelligence   solutions for customers.

As a Microsoft Gold certified partner, we have extensive experience in delivering Office 365 based records management-based solutions. We have Office 365 consultants in Melbourne & Sydney. For more information, please contact our Artificial Intelligence Consultants from enquiries@prometix.com.au

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