Microsoft Teams FAQ bot with Power Virtual Agents

-

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Microsoft 365 Records Management Compliance

-
As a SharePoint consulting practice, we at Prometix had a chance to implement a Microsoft 365 Records Management service This is a fairly new service and Microsoft announced in May the commercial release of the Microsoft 365 Records Management service. This service, which lets organisations apply "labels" to documents, as well as machine learning to automatically apply those labels, is designed to address legal compliance tracking issues for organisations. Microsoft claims it'll help demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. This will assist in integrating with Business Intelligence such PowerBI, and artificial intelligence such as Azure services. The Records Management service is currently available through the  Microsoft 365 Compliance Center . Organisations need to have Microsoft 365 E5/A5 or Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management licenses to use the service, which gives them the rights to automatically apply ...
Read more

Collaboration with SharePoint VS MS Teams

-
With all the hustle and bustle of the workplace, it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for or know who to ask. Defining who is working on what and how they’re involved in the project isn’t always a simple task. Although SharePoint has made managing and sharing content easier, it still isn’t as seamless as its end users would hope. Being able to access content and applications all in one place is useful but doesn’t solve the problem of how to organize information that is only relevant to certain groups. The main goal of SharePoint is to facilitate collaboration, but when content is broadcasted to the entire organization, it can make end users unsure which information applies to them. Microsoft has acknowledged this issue with the creation of its new collaboration tools, SharePoint team sites and Microsoft Teams . These allow end users to create separate areas specifically designed for certain projects they’re working on and for the teams they’re working with. By organizi...
Read more

Data Governance with Azure Purview

-
Image
The modern workplace his a data-centric world. Organisations are always increasing the amount of data they must collect, store, and analyse to inform critical business decisions and measure their organisation’s performance. As data becomes increasingly important, so do the tools needed to discover, manage, and track information in the absence of a data governance program. In the absence of a data governance program, the decisions made about key data systems are made by association staff who “own” the system. When there are different owners for systems (which is very common), the result is inconsistencies in data availability, collection, usability, integrity, and security. This instantly causes data quality problems. It also can negatively impact user experience if there is no integration or procedures to update the existing data within your environment. If you and your organisation find yourselves in such a predicament, Prometix highly recommends deploying an Azure Purview solution....
Read more