The way we work has fundamentally changed over the last year. The world has moved to remote work and is now gradually recovering into hybrid work. Employees need to get accurate information easily and quickly so they can be at their best regardless of where they are working from. Since Power Virtual Agents in Teams integration launched last year, we have seen many organizations building bots to address this challenge. Chatbots are being used beyond HR, IT functions to cover facility hours, tech troubleshooting, employee training and other functions to keep their employees informed.
While the knowledge and capability of the bot is critical to its success, the ability to pull in human assistance when it cannot help is equally critical for a good employee experience. By working with many customers, we have taken our learnings and designed an Employee FAQ bot template to notify human experts in Microsoft Teams when the bot cannot help. It allows employees to check their escalation request while waiting for expert to reach out and provide feedback on their experience. To close the loop, the template also includes a Power App for the expert team to audit all of the escalation requests and verbal feedback so they can continuously improve the bot and human service.
Employee FAQ template saves your time from designing the human assistance workflow so you can focus on your organization’s needs and the corresponding bot content. Let’s take a quick tour at what the template offers out of the box!
Escalate to human expert in Teams
Out of the box, the bot has been designed to collect user’s inquiry when escalation takes place and sends it to a team channel in Microsoft Teams. The escalation will be triggered when the bot cannot assist the employee or employee has explicitly requested to speak to a human. You can specify which team channel for the bot to send the requests to. Many customers set up an Expert channel in the team that is responsible for assisting the employees. For example, a facility operation FAQ bot has an Expert channel in the Facility management team.
Figure 1 – Collect escalation request in Power Virtual Agents
Once employee’s escalation request is received, a beautifully crafted card with the request detail will be posted in the team channel. Experts can start a 1:1 conversation with the employee from the card right inside of Teams and directly resolve the request after providing assistance.
Figure 2 – Escalation request card in Teams channel
Sometimes experts may need more time before they can help an employee. The Employee FAQ template allows employees to look up their request status from the bot while waiting for experts to reach out.
Figure 3 – Employee looking up their escalation request status in Teams
Provide employee feedback
Besides able to provide timely human assistance to employees, gathering their feedback is critical to having a delightful bot and service experience in the long run. Employee FAQ template will collect CSAT rating and their verbal feedback each time the bot completes a user’s request. Employees can also explicitly request to provide feedback to the bot.
Figure 4 – Collect employee feedback in Power Virtual Agents
You can specify the team channel for the feedback to be posted in. Once feedback is collected, the team channel will receive a card with the employee’s feedback so experts can monitor them in real time.
Figure 5 – Employee feedback card in team channel
Audit escalation request and employee feedback
As the bot becomes more popular, the escalation request and feedback volume will increase too. Organizations need a way to review those information in a scalable fashion. One of the best things about Employee FAQ template is all employee’s escalation request and feedback is stored in the Dataverse for Teams environment. The template comes with an Employee FAQ Admin Power App that can be added as a tab to the expert team. Experts can see what are the most commonly escalated issues and feedback to improve the bot and their human assistance process.
Figure 6 – Audit escalation request and feedback in team channel tab
Being built with PowerApps, you can customize the Employee FAQ Admin app in Power Apps Teams app to change the table structure, look and feel of it without needing to be a software developer.
Figure 7 – Customize the Employee FAQ Admin app in PowerApps
This is awesome, how can I set it up?
Power Virtual Agents Employee FAQ bot template is available at https://aka.ms/PVAEmployeeFAQ. By following the instructions, you will be able to have your own Employee FAQ bot in just a matter of minutes with no-coding required.
Once you have the bot setup, consider the following to build a delightful bot experience for your employee:
- Update the Greeting system topic to set the right expectation on what the bot is for and what it can do
- Create new topics or bring in existing content from your organization into the bot via topic suggestion capability
- Enhance your bot by adding actions so not only can it answer questions but help employee to take actions conversationally.
- Depending on your target audience, you may want to partner with your admin to roll out and pre-install the bot for your organization so the bot can be at employee’s fingertips!
We are excited to hear your experience with the Employee FAQ bot template and how it helps your employee to be more efficient. Happy bot building!
