Improve Customer Experiences with Microsoft’s New Virtual Agent for Customer Service

Did you know that 89% of customers stop doing business with a brand after a bad experience? Having a unique product offering or a competitive pricing structure is no longer enough on its own. In today’s ever-evolving digital world, it is the customer experience that truly matters. Providing an excellent customer experience is conducive to business success as it helps companies build a strong brand reputation and drives customer loyalty.

Microsoft understands the importance of delivering excellent customer experiences and as a result, have delivered the new Virtual Agent – an intelligent bot that helps customer service teams optimize operations and drive efficiency. The Virtual Agent delivers personalized conversations depending on customer needs and helps to quickly resolve issues at any given time.

The Virtual Agent uses AI to help real life customer service agents deal with issues that can be resolved through an automated process. Customer service teams are empowered to build and monitor bots, update and tweak conversations as well as set rules for desired actions on the back-end. The ability to automate this process speeds up customer service and frees up time for agents to focus on more complicated tasks. The agents can see the whole transcript that a customer had with a virtual agent through the Dynamics 365 omni-channel engagement hub. This provides them with all the context and information they need from a specific customer interaction.

The beauty of this tool is that it does not have to be built by a technical person. Creating bots has traditionally been developer driven or required support from a data scientist. There have been several challenges linked to building bots on the old Microsoft Bot Framework. Firstly, it requires you to understand various API’s, databases, Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Cognitive services as well as various conversation channels. Secondly, the reliance on multiple API’s to different application services can be potentially risky.

However, that is not the case with Microsoft’s new Virtual Agent. This new feature allows you to make a bot without any programming knowledge. It is entirely configuration driven and because no code is required it means you can quickly build it yourself without technical support. Once you have finished building your bot it outputs a bit of HTML code that you simply add to your live site. The bot is tied to Dynamics 365 CRM applications, but it will not perform tasks until you implement it with Microsoft Flows. Once flows have been created you can easily set the bot up to action commands based on a customer‘s response. For example, you can utilize the bot to update a contacts personal information in CRM or provide the customer with information on their purchase history based on information in your database.

I myself am a marketer, and was curious to see just how simple it would be to build a bot from scratch. I signed up for Virtual Agent and had a play around inside the preview to see what I could piece together. I was amazed at just how fast and intuitive it was to build a bot and create automated conversations that tied to easy to implement actions. I was equally impressed that the trigger phrases for conversations did not need to be an exact match. Virtual Agent understands the semantic meaning behind a conversation trigger and can respond accordingly. This really goes to show how Microsoft is using AI to empower the everyday professional to build upon and improve customer experiences.

Microsoft’s Virtual Agent opens up a world of opportunity for organizations looking to interact more efficiently with their customers. In addition to providing a more seamless experience for customers, Virtual Agent also offers AI-driven insights that draw attention to your organizations most relevant KPIs and emerging topics. You no longer need to look at cases individually as the AI does it for you, aggregating important data and enabling you to prioritize specific cases. It also empowers managers to understand the performance of their team and where there is room for improvement.

Test it out for yourself. Sign up for the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent Customer Service Preview and build your own bot.