Getting Started With Virtual Agents in Dynamics 365

In 1995, when John McCarthy came up with Artificial Intelligence, little did people think about its life-changing properties! Today, AI is evident in our day – to – day lives to the extent that we take its existence for granted. Siri on your iPhone is AI, Facebook predicting what you would like to see and conjuring up feeds for you based on the predictions is AI, and even Netflix creating a list of recommendations is AI.

Those above weren’t mere examples of Artificial Intelligence, but also excellent examples of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Acquisition.

We all know that Customer Service is an integral component of a successful business, and hence AI is considerably powerful in this sector – it had to be! After all, in 2019, Microsoft launched their very own Virtual Agents in Dynamics 365 that helps companies come up with their very own ‘Siris’ and ‘Alexas’.

Note: Virtual Agent has been launched as a Preview in Dynamics 365. This means that the present version is made available so that people can use it and give feedback. The final version may defer in several aspects, including privacy and security.

What is Dynamic 365 Virtual Agent?

Remember the times when a data scientist and a developer had to bang their heads together for hours before coming up with a chatbot prototype that fit user needs? Well, that time is done and dusted. With Virtual Agents for Customer Services, one can build a perfectly functional chatbot with zero coding and with 100% practical guidance. It eliminates latencies between identifying an issue and deploying bots for it. The main idea behind this introduction is to:

• Allow your customer service teams to build their very own bots with ease. Usually, these teams consist of people not very proficient at coding, and Virtual Agent is a dashboard meant to be at their service.
• Cutting costs by letting bots handle generic issues faced by your customers.
• Improve your customer satisfaction index by allowing them to solve their issues very quickly and at whatever time of the day they want.

Note: A detailed account of its working and a step by step guide to provision a Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent can be found in the previous article titled “Dynamics customer service bots: How to make the most of it!”.

Points to keep in mind before you start!

Here are the answers to some of the most common questions that must have popped up in your mind while getting started with this excellent Dynamics solution:

Browsers supported by Virtual Agent: Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Note that Internet Explorer is NOT recommended. Branding: You cannot change the style of the bot, as per now. Microsoft has promised a future update regarding the same.

How to make the bot escalate to a human agent?

Follow these steps:

1. Open the ‘Topics’ page and hover on the ‘Escalate’ system topic. Then select the edit button.
2. In the BOT SAYS box, paste the link of your engagement hub chat canvas. Then click on SAVE.

Report A Bug Or Share A New Idea: This being a Preview, Microsoft has expert support and software testing services team, and it allows you to report bugs and dysfunctional ties you have found through this community forum. Also, if you have new ideas that they could implement before making this setting this in stone, you can share it with them through this link.

Time Taken: For a bot to get created, it might take up to 15 minutes, and that’s perfectly normal. While a bot is being deployed, you might explore the panel as no changes would harm the creation of your bot.

What not to do:

The probable reasons due to which your bot is performing poorly are:

• Unengaged Sessions: When you have missing topics or no topics to address your customer’s questions, it is known as an unengaged session. A significant number of unengaged sessions would lead to a decline in performance.
• Incomplete Topics: If your topics are incomplete or not written in a wholesome manner, your bot performance would be wrong. A just example would be that of a customer asking for returns. However, your topic contains information only on exchanges. The customer would either be dissatisfied or would request for a human correspondent.
• Overlapping Triggers: Avoid using the same trigger words on multiple topics as this might trigger the wrong issue, leaving your customers dissatisfied or with incorrect information.

Ideally, you should check the performance of your bot under the ‘Analytics’ tab. Look at the Escalate and Abandon charts and see the topics that are performing poorly. Rewrite those topics and reiterate this process. Over time, your bot performance would improve.

Closing Thoughts

No matter whom your current vendor is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Services can easily be integrated into your existing support systems. This is an exceptional tool meant to help customer support teams create a straightforward chatbot for the betterment of their customers and enterprises. The best part is that this is still a Preview version, which means you control its future.

If you haven’t still checked Virtual Agent out, it’s time you try your hand at it and let Microsoft know what you think of their latest Dynamics introduction. We’re super excited to see what the final version of Virtual Agent could be, and what privacy and security changes will be made to the existing models.