Chatbots have many use cases, starting from internal onboarding bots all the way to marketing tools to help with conversion. We have particularly seen them helpful when it comes to customer service.

Chatbots make it possible for any company to provide help to customers 24/7 without the need to have a global human agent network and hence provide immediate help to customers and relief for support agents.

We see these trends firsthand and that’s why we are heavily investing in making our integration with Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service better with every release.

This month we have some big news to share.

Integrated licensing

Power Virtual Agents sessions now come included in Omnichannel licenses. Every customer that purchases Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service (Digital Messaging or Chat licenses) gets Power Virtual Agents sessions to get started with their journey to world-class customer service solution.

Learn more about the licensing updates in Dynamics 365 licensing guide.

Making it easier to get started

Dynamics 365 Omnichannel now has new first run experience during which Power Virtual Agents bots get automatically created, linked to the Omnichannel hub and added to the right workstream and queues making it extremely simple to get started on your journey to automation.

Go to your Omnichannel engagement hub and try it out now!

Figure 1: Power Virtual Agents bot created as part of Omnichannel first run experience
Making PVA and Omnichannel work better together

We have also been busy making sure the two products work well together and shipped several improvements in the area in the past month.

We made it possible to use context shared from Omnichannel to be used directly in Power Virtual Agents from the very first message. This way you can personalize customer’s experience even more seamlessly. Learn more about context passing.

We have heard your feedback about making sure that conversations that don’t get escalated to human agents get auto closed in Omnichannel. We have now updated the bots so that they close conversations when the conversation times out after 30 minutes of inactivity.

There has been more goodness happening over the past several months including improvements to reliability and bug fixes.

We’re excited to have you on the journey with us as we continue to make the integration between Power Virtual Agents and Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service the best there is!

The post Power Virtual Agents + Omnichannel: Delivering an even better together experience appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The Create page lets users initiate bot creation and go to the Power Virtual Agents portal to finish the bot creation in the environment they have selected.

You will have to sign up for a 60 day trial if you do not have a Power Virtual Agents subscription. We have made it super easy to sign up using a single click and you will be guided through that experience.

Manage bots from Power Apps

Once you create the bots in your environment, you can easily manage them from the Chatbots > List view. You will see the bots you have permissions for. From here you can see how many topics the bot includes to gauge the size of the bot. You will also see the owner of the bot.

To make it easy to manage the bots, we have introduced a number of quick actions for you to take. You can select Edit, Topics or Analytics. Each of these options will take you directly to Power Virtual Agents so that you can continue in your workflow.

Learn more in documentation.

The post Create and manage your chatbots from Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

To see the number of billed sessions for a bot, go to Analytics -> Billing. You will be able to see how many billed sessions the bot consumed during the selected period. We will start displaying the data when the feature went live, so you won’t be able to see historic trends right away.

What is a billed session?

A billed session is an interaction between the customer and the bot and represents one unit of consumption. The billed session begins when a user topic is triggered (user topics are different from system topics and you can distinguish between them in the Topics list).

The session ends for one of the following reasons:

• The user ends the chat sessions.
  When the bot doesn’t receive a new message for more than 30 minutes, it’s considered closed.
• The session is longer than 60 minutes.
  The first message that occurs after 60 minutes starts a new session.
• The session has more than 100 turns. One turn is defined as one exchange between a user and the bot.
  The 101st turn starts a new session.

Please note that using the embedded test chat canvas while building your bot won’t count towards the billed sessions.

See more info in our documentation here.

What’s next?

We’re working on providing you even more visibility into the usage of Power Virtual Agents inside your organization and will provide a high-level overview of organization-wide usage later in the calendar year.

Trial users

Please note that you will see number of billed sessions even if you are a trial user. The data should provide you information on how many sessions you should purchase once you upgrade to a paid subscription.

The post See how many billed sessions your bot consumes appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Watch a quick overview of the built-in analytics below.

Dive deeper

Each of the available metrics in the built-in dashboard has been deliberately selected by the team behind Power Virtual Agents to help you improve your bots. To learn more about the metrics, visit aka.ms/PVA/Analytics or watch the deep dive video below.

We’d love to hear your feedback. Please visit our community forum at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsForum and share your feedback.

And submit your idea requests at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsIdeas.

Thanks!

The post Improve performance of your bots using the built-in analytics appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.