{"id":724,"date":"2020-05-17T23:45:22","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T06:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-copilot\/blog\/copilot-studio\/quickly-build-a-microsoft-teams-faq-bot-with-power-virtual-agents\/"},"modified":"2025-06-30T03:20:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T10:20:54","slug":"quickly-build-a-microsoft-teams-faq-bot-with-power-virtual-agents","status":"publish","type":"copilot","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-copilot\/blog\/copilot-studio\/quickly-build-a-microsoft-teams-faq-bot-with-power-virtual-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"Quickly build a Microsoft Teams FAQ bot with Power Virtual Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the current challenging times, there are a wide range of circumstances organizations experience that require communication tools to be created and deployed efficiently to help employees with their remote work needs. This blog post walks you through a Microsoft Teams FAQ bot that is pre-installed by an organization admin to help onboard new employees and support their remote office setup needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This bot can help address common questions from employees such as new employee orientation dates.  It can also notify human experts for requests that require human intervention, for example, getting ergonomic furniture for their remote office. The bot is deployed on Microsoft Teams so it is available to everyone in the organization. You can sign up<\/a> for the Power Virtual Agents trial version to create a bot (trial is free for 30 days and currently extendable after 30 days). This blog walks you through an example with guidance that you can expand for other scenarios. The key goal of this blog is to help you get a Microsoft Teams bot deployed quickly to meet employee needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Employee Experience<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

An employee who has just joined Contoso asks a few questions related to office reopening, new employee orientation, and uploading documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, he moves on to ask for support with special accommodations, specifically ergonomic furniture. The bot needs to connect him with an HR expert to understand the situation better. The bot gathers some information to create a request ticket and submits it to the Onboarding channel in Teams where HR experts can see the request and handle it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since there is a longer than normal wait time today, the employee checks his request status with the bot to make sure it is still active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An onboarding expert sees the notification in the Expert assistance channel in Teams and reaches out to the employee. After helping the employee out, he returns to the Expert channel and closes the ticket.<\/span>
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The employee can also check the status of his requests again and confirm that it has been closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building the bot<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s switch to look at what it takes to build this bot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, to address the onboarding questions like \u2018when will the office reopen\u2019, \u2018how will new hire orientation work\u2019, \u2018where should I submit my paperwork\u2019, the bot has a topic for each of these questions, but the bot author did not have to create each of these topics manually. Using the built-in topic suggestions feature, you can bring in existing FAQ content into the bot with a few clicks. The AI assisted authoring capabilities in Power Virtual Agents makes this very easy to do. Watch the video and read more about bringing FAQ content into your bot here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s take a look at the \u2018Special Accommodations\u2019 topic. The branching condition for \u2018Ergonomic Furniture\u2019 in this topic redirects to the \u2018Escalate\u2019 topic which notifies the HR experts.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The \u2018Escalate\u2019 topic is where the ticket for the user\u2019s request is created and the Expert channel is notified.  It uses the user\u2019s sign-in info to know which user has requested for assistance. After gathering the title and description of the user\u2019s request, it leverages one of the most powerful capabilities in Power Virtual Agents to embed Power Automate flows in a topic for the bot to take action during a conversation. The ‘Escalate’ topic uses two Power Automate flows.  One to create the request and the other to notify the experts in the Teams channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s look at the request creation one first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Power Virtual Agents passes in parameters from the bot (employee\u2019s name, title, and description) to create a request using the ticket entity.  This utilizes Power Platform\u2019s built-in Common Data Service (CDS) database. The built-in Power Automate CDS connector \u2018Create a new record\u2019 action creates a new ticket record in CDS. The request details are filled by using dynamic content passed in from Power Virtual Agents. Once completed, it returns the request ticket reference to the bot for using further down in the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Now let\u2019s look at the second Power Automate flow that notifies the experts in a Teams channel.   The flow has a parallel branch to allow the bot\u2019s conversation with employee to continue while waiting for an HR expert to close the request.  It uses Power Automate\u2019s Microsoft Teams connector \u2018Post an Adaptive card to a Teams channel and wait for a response\u2019 action to send the employee\u2019s request to the Expert channel.  When the expert takes action on the adaptive card, it uses the request ticket reference passed in by Power Virtual Agents to mark the corresponding request inactive and logs the expert\u2019s name via CDS connector\u2019s \u2018Update a record\u2019 action.<\/p>\n\n\n

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One of the great benefits of using Common Data Service to store the request ticket is that it keeps all the records.  This allows the organization to audit the request history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making the bot available on Microsoft Teams<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Once the bot is ready and the author is satisfied with its quality, he can publish the bot with one-click to make the content available to end users. To make the bot discoverable in Teams, generate the Teams app package with the bot\u2019s app ID following the steps outlined in the documentation here<\/a>.  As an admin, you can upload the package to Teams tenant app catalog or utilizes Teams Admin center to pre-pin the bot for all employees.  This way new hire employee can easily find the bot on their left app bar in Teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s recap what we have seen:<\/p>\n\n\n\n