During the recent User Group in Amsterdam Microsoft was showing off the Virtual Assistant that uses flow type logic to build a great Chat experience for your web pages. One thing that caught my eye was a little button on the top right corner of the Dynamics screen.
This is all taken from a demo Microsoft showed at the User Group, so I don’t have the live environment personally yet. If pictures or the story don’t match when you get it live, there might be some magic behind the scenes they didn’t talk about.
So the end user would start a chat in any CMS provider of your choice.
Behind the scenes we now get to create a pretty awesome BOT with smartness. Creating a new BOT flow uses the same look and feel as the Microsoft Flow UX. It even allows us access to flows to complete certain responses. This tool is capable of running all the connectors within the Power Plattform, and return results directly to the end customer!
In the picture below you see the virtual agent in the side bar. This side bar hasn’t been opened up to partners yet for altering the content in a smart way, but the Virtual Agent works the same way that Cafe X worked. Almost exactly like CafeX worked.
When opening the sidebar, you are presented with the view from the Omni-channel engagement hub.
At this point a call from the chatt was waiting, and the agent had to accept it.
Immediately you are shown the complete chat dialog leading to the bot escalating the chat to the agent.
As you can see in the bottom right, the options for saving the chat, creating new actions, routing, transfer etc are all here. You can even add internal notes before sending the customer to another agent.
My key takeaway here is that the chat bot can connect to the flow channel leaving us with a lot of cool features for instant feedback to the customer. No more creating bots that use custom development that only a few understand. Focus your efforts on creating custom connectors in powerplattform if you want to make something custom:)