What is a Power Virtual Agent?
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is a no-code solution that allows you to easily build intelligent bots. It is a part of the Microsoft Power Platform that leverages Generative AI capabilities for quick and efficient development. It is common for businesses now to use chatbots for customer support services. With Power Virtual Agent, they can add artificial intelligence to the bots. Thus, bots can understand customer queries and deliver relevant answers immediately.
How does Microsoft Power Virtual Agent work?
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is a SAAS solution from the Power Platform. It enables businesses to create custom artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. The solution requires a limited setup and offers a user-friendly interface. Since the bot uses generative AI, it can answer questions appropriately on any topic satisfying your customers. Power Virtual Agents chatbot links the back-end system to take on specific conditions based on Power Automate. It ensures the bot can follow the required actions. Businesses can monitor chatbots to review their performance and make improvements over time.
Why use Power Virtual Agents?
Simple to build
Power Virtual Agent, with its no-code interface, allows anyone to build chatbots, regardless of technical capability. Generative AI makes it quick to build intelligent chatbots without much effort.
Integration
Power Virtual Agent offers many pre-built connectors, allowing developers to deploy chatbots to websites, social media, mobile apps, or any Microsoft platform.
24/7 customer service
With an AI-powered chatbot, businesses can be available across time zones and deliver 24/7 support service for customers and employees.
Personalize the experience
Generative AI capabilities of the bot enable it to customize responses based on the user input. It ensures users get relevant answers in a natural conversation flow.
Increased customer satisfaction
With instant responses to their queries and round-the-clock availability, businesses can deliver enhanced customer satisfaction.
Where can Power Virtual Agents be used?
Power Virtual Agents can be used in multiple ways. We have listed some examples for an idea:
Store/office open hours
Developers can test the conversation on the bots. For example, they can type "Office Open hours" in the bot. They can begin the conversation and raise questions like what locations customers are interested in and show the open hours for that office branch.
Employee Helpdesk
Employees, especially new joiners, can search for any questions related to the company. The bot refers to a large database of knowledge bases to retrieve answers quickly.
HR policy documents
HR can ask the bot to search for appropriate employee-specific policies to learn about any policy or find relevant documents.
Facilities manager
The chatbot can answer the common questions a facilities manager receives, like safety precautions at work during a pandemic.
Microsoft Teams
The chatbots developed using Power Virtual Agent easily integrate with Microsoft Teams. It enables employees to engage with each other quickly. They can ask questions through the bot and get relevant answers and automate common business processes.
How Are Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Services Similar?
Microsoft PVA and Azure Bot Service are both services from Microsoft. They both allow building chatbots easily. The similarities between the two are-
- A parent company (Microsoft)
- Integrations and cross-functionalities (such as LUIS)
- Same level of functionality
How Are Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Services Different?
Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Services have distinct ways of building bots and were created for different use cases.
Framework vs Platform
Azure Bot Service is a framework for building internal and customer-facing bots. Power Virtual Agent is a separate platform for agile low-code development.
Different Parts of the Microsoft Stack
Azure Bot Service is part of Microsoft Azure cloud services, while Power Virtual Agent belongs to the Microsoft Power platform.
Azure bot service offers seamless integrations with the cloud. Whereas Power Virtual Agent integrates seamlessly with the Power triage (BI, Automate, and Apps).
Pricing
The Azure Bot Service offers a free trial version. It also makes its standard channels free of charge. The premium channels are free for the first 10,000 messages, after which you must pay $0.50 per 1,000 messages.
The Microsoft PVA pricing plan charges $1,000 monthly for up to 2,000 chatbot sessions. Over this number of sessions, you can get add-ons for a further 1000 sessions at $450 a month.
