13 Apr
How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service
Delivering positive customer experiences has become critical for organizations to drive engagement, purchases, loyalty and retention. To this end, many enterprise leaders have deployed AI customer service technologies like chatbots for various use cases.
Several Microsoft customers are already using Bot Framework to build customer chatbots. These bots though effective require high coding and more resources. To overcome this, many customers are using Azure-driven low-code chatbot builder platforms like BotCore developed by Acuvate, a Microsoft Gold Partner.
With the launch of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, Microsoft is aiming to supercharge the capabilities of customer service bots and pave the way for a low-code and seamless bot building experience. In this article, we’ll give an overview of this new technology and what it means for Microsoft customers.
What Are Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents?
As the name indicates, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents is a combined package of Microsoft’s two key technologies – Dynamics 365 (Customer Relationship Management Software) and Power Virtual Agents (low-code chatbot builder platform).
If you’re a Microsoft user, you must be familiar with Dynamics 365. With its no-code guided graphical interface, Power Virtual Agents enables business teams to build powerful chatbots quickly and with no developer help.
It is also a part of Microsoft’s prestigious Power Platform – a low-code business application platform which brings PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate and Virtual Agents under one umbrella.
As chatbot technology becomes critical in customer service operations, it’s integration with a CRM is a no brainer. Customer service teams can use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents to easily identify and automate common support issues – without having to write code.
The Need For Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents
Let’s quickly explore the current state of customer service chatbots built with bot frameworks and the limitations associated with them.
- The success of customer service chatbot largely depends on the quality and quantity of the bot’s knowledge – topics it understands and can deliver the right solutions. Customer service experts who actually interact with customers and know their problems are often disconnected from the bot development process due to the high coding most framework-based chatbots today require. This leads to poor bot conversations and customer experience. Empowering customer service teams to create virtual agents by themselves is imperative to success.
- New requests and queries emerge due to changing market and business conditions. Ex: launch of a new product, roll out of a new product update, etc. This means the chatbot’s content should also be updated. Customer service teams should be provided with the ability to easily update the bot and add new topics without any hassle and long update cycles.
- Customers can get frustrated if the bot doesn’t understand their intents. A chatbot should be equipped with AI and NLP capabilities that adapt to customer content.
- Customer service chatbots should extend their capabilities well beyond responding to users – they should be able to perform tasks on behalf of customers. Hence, it’s key to integrate them with backend systems.
Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration
How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Help?
The solution provides a proactive workflow for resolving customer issues and a modern approach to customer service. Let’s deep dive into its key features.
1. Discover Issues to automate
With the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights dashboard, you can identify issues which are repetitive, trending and time-consuming for your agents. The AI in the software also provides recommendations on the right issues to automate.
2. Automate support issues with the virtual agent
Once the common support topics and issues to be automated are identified, customer service teams can easily build a virtual agent that’ll automatically address these issues. With a simple no-code graphical interface and ready-to-use templates, agents can build rich conversations within minutes. If there is no need to build a new virtual agent, human agents can also update the knowledge of an existing chatbot with the same ease.
3. Complete actions on behalf of users
Virtual agents can not only troubleshoot users’ problems by chatting with them but also perform actions on their behalf. By integrating Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, your customer service team can enable a trigger which lets bots to access data or perform tasks in your back-end systems.
4. Human Hand off
When a virtual agent can’t solve an issue or the conversation becomes too complex to handle, it provides customers an option to “Talk to a human agent”. Once the customer agrees, the virtual agent hands off the conversation to a human agent.
Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots
5. Monitor Performance with Analytics
Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents comes with an AI-powered analytics dashboard in which you can track topics that are handled, which topics need human handoff and overall performance of the virtual agent. The dashboard continuously provides suggestions on improving service experience and frees up the bandwidth of your agents.
Business Benefits Of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents
The software drives a win-win-win situation for customers, human agents, and management. Customers will get better service experience, agents can focus on productive tasks and management can reduce operating costs. Here are some more benefits:
- Increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
- 24*7 Self-service
- Reduced customer service costs
- Improved agent productivity
- Personalized service experiences
- Increased ROI from back end systems
Pricing
The pricing for the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents package – which includes Power Virtual Agents + Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights starts from $1,100 per tenant/month. This includes
2,000 Power Virtual Agents Sessions and 100,000 Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights cases.
Get Started
Microsoft is coming up with new features for Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents including AI-driven dialogs, multi-lingual support, support for telephony and more! Microsoft customers planning to modernize their customer service should look into implementing this exciting new technology which brings the best of Microsoft innovations – Dynamics 365, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate together. The future of delivering stellar customer experiences depends on the robustness of your service workflow and Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents helps you build a powerful one.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic or planning to implement the solution, please feel free to get in touch with one of our Microsoft and chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.
Rakesh Reddy is our co-founder and a serial entrepreneur. A mechanical engineer by education, his business vision and direction as Chairman & CEO drives us to excellence. An avid team player, he works with his executive team to trigger growth for Acuvate across geographies and business areas. His business acumen, strategy and planning skills catalyzed the growth of Acuvate since its inception. A natural leader, he has been able to successfully bootstrap his companies, help win customers and successfully constitute the company’s board and a robust leadership team.
Rakesh Reddy