While the knowledge and capability of the bot is critical to its success, the ability to pull in human assistance when it cannot help is equally critical for a good employee experience.  By working with many customers, we have taken our learnings and designed an Employee FAQ bot template to notify human experts in Microsoft Teams when the bot cannot help.  It allows employees to check their escalation request while waiting for expert to reach out and provide feedback on their experience.  To close the loop, the template also includes a Power App for the expert team to audit all of the escalation requests and verbal feedback so they can continuously improve the bot and human service.

Employee FAQ template saves your time from designing the human assistance workflow so you can focus on your organization’s needs and the corresponding bot content.    Let’s take a quick tour at what the template offers out of the box!

Escalate to human expert in Teams

Out of the box, the bot has been designed to collect user’s inquiry when escalation takes place and sends it to a team channel in Microsoft Teams.   The escalation will be triggered when the bot cannot assist the employee or employee has explicitly requested to speak to a human.  You can specify which team channel for the bot to send the requests to.  Many customers set up an Expert channel in the team that is responsible for assisting the employees.  For example,  a facility operation FAQ bot has an Expert channel in the Facility management team.

Figure 1 – Collect escalation request in Power Virtual Agents

Once employee’s escalation request is received, a beautifully crafted card with the request detail will be posted in the team channel.  Experts can start a 1:1 conversation with the employee from the card right inside of Teams and directly resolve the request after providing assistance.

Figure 2 – Escalation request card in Teams channel

Sometimes experts may need more time before they can help an employee.  The Employee FAQ template allows employees to look up their request status from the bot while waiting for experts to reach out.

Figure 3 – Employee looking up their escalation request status in Teams

Provide employee feedback

Besides able to provide timely human assistance to employees, gathering their feedback is critical to having a delightful bot and service experience in the long run. Employee FAQ template will collect CSAT rating and their verbal feedback each time the bot completes a user’s request. Employees can also explicitly request to provide feedback to the bot.

Figure 4 – Collect employee feedback in Power Virtual Agents

You can specify the team channel for the feedback to be posted in.  Once feedback is collected, the team channel will receive a card with the employee’s feedback so experts can monitor them in real time.

Figure 5 – Employee feedback card in team channel

Audit escalation request and employee feedback

As the bot becomes more popular, the escalation request and feedback volume will increase too.  Organizations need a way to review those information in a scalable fashion.  One of the best things about Employee FAQ template is all employee’s escalation request and feedback is stored in the Dataverse for Teams environment.  The template comes with an Employee FAQ Admin Power App that can be added as a tab to the expert team.  Experts can see what are the most commonly escalated issues and feedback to improve the bot and their human assistance process.

Figure 6 – Audit escalation request and feedback in team channel tab

Being built with PowerApps, you can customize the Employee FAQ Admin app in  Power Apps Teams app to change the table structure, look and feel of it without needing to be a software developer.

Figure 7 – Customize the Employee FAQ Admin app in PowerApps

This is awesome, how can I set it up?

Power Virtual Agents Employee FAQ bot template is available at https://aka.ms/PVAEmployeeFAQ.  By following the instructions, you will be able to have your own Employee FAQ bot in just a matter of minutes with no-coding required.

Once you have the bot setup, consider the following to build a delightful bot experience for your employee:

1. Update the Greeting system topic to set the right expectation on what the bot is for and what it can do
2. Create new topics or bring in existing content from your organization into the bot via topic suggestion capability
3. Enhance your bot by adding actions so not only can it answer questions but help employee to take actions conversationally.
4. Depending on your target audience, you may want to partner with your admin to roll out and pre-install the bot for your organization so the bot can be at employee’s fingertips!

We are excited to hear your experience with the Employee FAQ bot template and how it helps your employee to be more efficient.  Happy bot building!

The post PVA Employee FAQ bot template appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

One of the most commonly asked best practice question is how to publish bot for users in Microsoft Teams.  Power Virtual Agents allows bot author to easily share the bot with their teammates directly in Microsoft Teams app store Built by your colleague section (learn more here) or partner with their Microsoft Teams admin to roll out the bot to broader audience.

Depending on the bot’s business scenario, partnering with your Microsoft Teams admin could be the best way to roll out your bot.  Many customers are delighted to learn how seamless it is to submit their Power Virtual Agents bot for Microsoft Teams admin approval.  We are sharing the learnings and best practice guidance here so you can easily partner with your admin on this journey.

Admin partnership scenarios

Partnering with your admin on bot roll out is a great option if your scenarios matches one or more of below:

1. You want to distribute the bot broadly across the organization and different teams.
   1. 1. The bot is intended for company wide or majority of the users in the organization.  This is a common trend for HR, IT, Facility or other bots that are managed by a department with the intention to reach broad audience.
      2. The bot is intended to be used by a group of users across different teams that have specific roles in the organization.  For example, a Front line worker assistant to look up product information during service appointments.
2. Pre-pin the bot for users who need to find the bot easily and consistently use it as part of a routine workflow.  For example, pre-pin HR bot for all employees or only pre-pin Front line worker assistant for the front line workers.
3. Your organization requires all bot roll out to go through the admin managed process.

Power Virtual Agents makes it super easy for bot author to partner with admin to roll out bots quickly and confidently.  We will show you how easy it is in the next 3 steps!

Step 1 – Submit your bot for admin approval

Once you are satisfied with your bot’s quality, it is time to work with your admin on the approval process.  Go to the bot’s publish page to publish it.  Once the bot is published, select Share the bot and choose to Submit for admin approval.  Make sure you provide a good bot icon, description and other relevant information so your admin knows what the bot is about and its value to end user.

Figure 1 – Submit for admin approval in Power Virtual Agents

Once you have completed the submission, you will now see the bot is pending approval from the admin.  The bot is now available in Microsoft Teams admin center for admin’s review.  You can refresh to check on the latest status.

Figure 2 – Waiting for admin approval

Step 2 – Admin approving the submission

Microsoft Teams admin will see your submission in Microsoft Teams admin center’s Manage app under the Teams apps section.  After reviewing the information you provided, the admin can approve and publish the app.

Figure 3 – Admin approve bot in Microsoft Teams Admin Center

This will result in the app becoming visible in Microsoft Teams app store Built by your org section.  It is also searchable via app store’s search bar.

Figure 4 – Bot is available in Microsoft Teams app store

Depending on the business scenario, the bot could be made only available to a selected set of users in the organization.  Admin can configure who the bot audience will be via the Permission policies in Microsoft Teams admin center.  You can learn more on how to create custom policies for app permissions here.

Step 3 – Partner with admin to pre-pin the bot for users

Having the bot in app store is a good first step!  Many customers partner with admins to pre-pin the bot in app bar for users and push the bot to them so they don’t need to find and install the bot for themselves.  This is a great way to ensure your audience knows the bot is available to them.  With the bot pre-pinned on app bar, users will always have the bot at their fingertips.

Figure 5 – Pre-pin bot in Microsoft Teams app bar

Admin can pre-pin the bot with Setup policies under Teams apps section in Microsoft Teams admin center by selecting the bot in the pre-pinned list.  It can be pre-pinned for everyone via the Global policy or for a group of users via custom policies.

Figure 6 – App setup policy to pre-pin bot for users

Other best practices

In this blog, we showed how easy it is to submit the bot as a bot author and partner with your admin to approve it.  You can learn more with the detail step by step guide in our documentation here.

In addition, we are sharing the best practices from our customer’s success:

1. Partner with your admin early on in the bot building journey to review the bot content and best strategy for adoption in your organization.
2. Each organization may have different approval process.  Work with your admin to see if the Microsoft Teams admin center approval process in this blog applies to your organization or not.
3. If your organization have not adopted the approval process here, you can always download the app manifest file via instruction here for the bot to go through the custom approval process for your organization.

We hope you find this blog helpful and we are excited to learn more on all the great innovations and success you have with Power Virtual Agents in Teams.  Happy bot building!

The post Partner with admin to roll out bot in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Power Virtual Agents now allows you to share your bot with your teammates, allowing multiple contributors to edit and manage your bot.  Subject matter experts in a team can collaborate together on a bot.  For example, a customer support bot can now have different subject matter experts working on refund related topics vs. topics related to membership.

What this short video for an overview and read on for details about sharing and collaborating on a bot.

Share a bot

To share a bot, select the Share button at the top of the bot’s Home page.

Specify the name or email address of the users that you would like to share the bot with.

Review and set the users’ permissions, and then select Share to share the bot with new users. Everyone you share the bot with can view, edit, configure, share and publish the bot, but they cannot delete it.

You can send an email invitation to new users by checking the check box Send an email invitation to new users.

Click Share and the bot is now shared with the selected users. They will receive an invitation email with a link to the bot and can log into Power Virtual Agents to access it.

Collaborate on a bot

When multiple users are logged into the bot, the topic list page shows new information to support a multi-user experience. You can see who last modified the bot and when. You can also see who is currently editing the bot – making for a truly collaborative experience on authoring bot content.

When multiple users are working in the same topic, the bot warns against any accidental overrides.

You can find more information on sharing a bot, assigning environment security roles, collaborating on a bot, and how to stop sharing a bot in our documentation.

Visit us in our community forum to share your questions and start a discussion on bot sharing.

The post Share and collaborate on your bot with subject matter experts appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

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 (trial is free for 30 days and currently extendable after 30 days). 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 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.

Building the bot

Let’s switch to look at what it takes to build this bot.

First, to address the onboarding questions like ‘when will the office reopen’, ‘how will new hire orientation work’, ‘where should I submit my paperwork’, the bot has a topic for each of these questions, but the bot author did not have to create each of these topics manually. Using the built-in topic suggestions feature, you can bring in existing FAQ content into the bot with a few clicks. The AI assisted authoring capabilities in Power Virtual Agents makes this very easy to do. Watch the video and read more about bringing FAQ content into your bot here.

Let’s take a look at the ‘Special Accommodations’ topic. The branching condition for ‘Ergonomic Furniture’ in this topic redirects to the ‘Escalate’ topic which notifies the HR experts.

The ‘Escalate’ topic is where the ticket for the user’s request is created and the Expert channel is notified.  It uses the user’s sign-in info to know which user has requested for assistance. After gathering the title and description of the user’s request, it leverages one of the most powerful capabilities in Power Virtual Agents to embed Power Automate flows in a topic for the bot to take action during a conversation. The ‘Escalate’ topic uses two Power Automate flows.  One to create the request and the other to notify the experts in the Teams channel.

Let’s look at the request creation one first.

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 Microsoft Teams connector ‘Post an Adaptive card to a Teams channel and wait for a response’ action to send the employee’s request to the Expert channel.  When the expert takes action on the adaptive card, it uses the request ticket reference passed in by Power Virtual Agents to mark the corresponding request inactive and logs the expert’s name via CDS connector’s ‘Update a record’ action.

One of the great benefits of using Common Data Service to store the request ticket is that it keeps all the records.  This allows the organization to audit the request history.

Making the bot available on Microsoft Teams

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 following the steps outlined in the documentation here.  As an admin, you can upload the package to Teams tenant app catalog or utilizes Teams Admin center to pre-pin the bot for all employees.  This way new hire employee can easily find the bot on their left app bar in Teams.

Let’s recap what we have seen:

• PVA bot can be deployed in Teams to make it reachable by employees of an organization
• PVA bot can conversationally resolve an employee’s issue in Teams using native Teams chat experience
• PVA bot can escalate to the expert channel in Teams and create a request ticket using Power Automate
• PVA offers a no-code/low-code way to quickly create a conversational bot
• PVA and Power Automates’ easy integration for bot to take action during a conversation

The great thing about this low-code bot making experience is that it is easy for subject matter experts to come back and modify the bot if content ever changes or new information needs to be added.  Truly empowering your organization’s subject matter experts to digitally transform their modern workplace conversationally.

Happy bot building!

The post Quickly build a Microsoft Teams FAQ bot with Power Virtual Agents appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.