Progressive harnesses fusion development using Power Virtual Agents to build “Cloudie”

Progressive Mutual Insurance Company was founded in 1937 in Ohio by two lawyers with ambitions of adding innovation to the auto insurance business. Today, innovation, collaboration, and culture are key at the 50,000-plus-employee enterprise. When several cloud teams at the business sought a solution to get internal customers, especially those without IT resources, quick answers to cloud-related queries, two professional developers used Power Virtual Agents and fusion development to quickly create the Cloudie chatbot. That work spurred other teams to create their own intelligent conversation chatbots using the no-code application.

“That was the appeal of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. We wanted a solution for internal customers who don’t have access to IT teams or developers to be able to build bots for themselves.”

Roger Reese, IT DevOps Engineer Lead, Progressive

When Progressive opened its doors more than 80 years ago, its founders aspired for innovation by opening the car insurance industry’s first drive-in claims site. Ask employees today what differentiates Progressive, and answers will typically include its people, culture, and collaborative spirit. Today’s atmosphere of innovation includes using fusion development—the concept of bringing together the citizen developer, professional developer, and other parties to build and use applications that propel the business.

It’s what helped inspire a professional developer to build an intelligent, conversational chatbot in less than three months using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, providing a resource for internal teams with limited IT support to get answers on cloud-based queries.

Two additional Power Virtual Agents-built bots are in production—one for a training team in Claims and the other targeting call representatives on a team with a new voice system that needs a bot to provide answers to troubleshooting questions.

Other groups at Progressive are interested in creating their own powerful bots. Roger Reese, IT DevOps Engineer Lead on the Cloud Business Solutions (CBS) team at Progressive, shared what he learned during his first bot-building process: using bots could help drive efficiencies by automating responses while keeping that authentic conversational tone that gave the interaction a human-like and personalized touch. “I let them know that it’s a no-code solution. That’s what sold them on Microsoft Power Virtual Agents,” adds Reese.

The power of fusion development

It was late November 2021. Reese and his colleague, both professional developers, began work on a bot for teams with limited or no IT support resources, such as Marketing, Claims, Training, and Helpdesk, to quickly answer common questions and provide additional resources. The idea was that the teams Reese supported could eventually build their own bots without having to know how to code, essentially creating citizen developers.

That’s the power of fusion development: professional developers work alongside non-coder users (who become citizen developers) to address business requirements. Users are involved throughout the development lifecycle, breaking down the “glass wall” that’s frequently found between non-coders and professional developers. “That’s what pushed us to Power Virtual Agents,” says Reese.

Reese began his work with an existing, but disused, bot called Cloudie. He decommissioned and pulled Cloudie out of production and began building from scratch because Cloudie needed to be specific to cloud topics.

Reese envisioned the process serving as a learning path to familiarize himself with no-code technology before opening it up to would-be citizen developers within the company. Reese had never created a bot before. “That made it fun and exciting,” he says.

Less than three months later, in February 2022, Cloudie was in production.

Cloudie bot greeting a user.

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Creating personalized chats with Cloudie

A topic defines how a bot conversation plays out. Reese worked on the topics, meaning he built the actual bot conversation, such as starting with a greeting, carrying on the chat naturally, and continuing with the possible conversational threads using the different cloud team topics.

The ability to put thoughts into a topic and make it conversational, as opposed to technical, is key. “That’s the ease of using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents,” says Reese. “Because it’s so conversational, it makes it much easier to write or redirect a topic.”

Minimum viable product (MVP) Cloudie is built with 75 questions. The user asks a question and receives up to two answers. The questions were generated by the subject-matter experts (SMEs) from the six cloud teams for whom Reese was building Cloudie.

The most common queries include: What is Cloudflow? How can I engage cloud teams? What does each cloud team do?

Cloudie bot returning two answers to a popular question about an internal Progressive tool.

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Peeking behind the Cloudie curtain

Power Virtual Agents’ out-of-the-box intelligent technology supports a variety of scenarios, although Reese’s bot just targets cloud-specific queries. Scenarios are supported through Power Virtual Agents bot topics, which are powered by Microsoft Power Automate workflows—a process referred to as “automation through conversation.”

Power Automate connects to Microsoft Azure QnA Maker, a cloud-based natural language processing (NLP) service, and returns the most appropriate answers (using the QnA Maker’s confidence level). With QnA Maker, all the question-and-answer pairs are combined and searched. Reese likened QnA Maker to a storage area for questions and answers; when a user types a question, Power Virtual Agents calls the Power Automate flow to QnA Maker and taps the probability rating to return the most appropriate answers.

Progressive’s Power Virtual Agents bots run through Microsoft Teams (Progressive is using the Power Virtual Agents in Teams license). Using Teams’ authentication, the user’s credentials are validated, much like single sign-on. Application registration is created within Azure Active Directory, and that gets connected to the bot.

Identifying opportunities for bot refinement

Cloudie is available for use to anyone at the 50,000-plus-employee enterprise to answer cloud-related questions, but its primary consumers will be IT resources. Reese estimates it could reach 1,000 to 2,000 sessions per year.

Users describe the Cloudie experience as very conversational, as opposed to technical-speak-centric. Progressive will use future feedback to refine the Cloudie knowledgebase with appropriate questions and answers. AI-powered topic suggestions from Power Virtual Agents will also aid in question improvement over time by identifying new conversational topics and opportunities for automation.

Using Power Virtual Agents’ out-of-the-box analytics, which include summary charts with insights into how the bot is performing, Progressive will make data-driven decisions about future enhancements, additions to the bot, and questions and answers to stay current on cloud topics.

As the company rolls out the solution to more users, it expects to see increased gains such as resource optimization, time savings, and productivity.

Progressive hopes that Cloudie will reduce the number of calls to the different cloud teams, minimize traffic to the Cloud Q and A Teams channel, provide information on requesting different types of access, and point users to frequently requested documents. “We're hoping to make Cloudie into a full reference area,” says Reese.

What’s next?

Utilizing Power Virtual Agents, a two-person team was able to quickly mobilize on bot creation. Progressive sees this as a step toward modernizing its IT helpdesk experience as it adds scenarios and question-and-answer pairs to all bots.

Progressive will conduct a targeted announcement later this year to push Cloudie to IT-based teams and believes it will draw more than 1,000 new users. In the meantime, Reese continues adding more question-and-answer pairs, tying questions into other areas, and enhancing lookups to ensure Cloudie is robust.

The business is considering an internal site with one- or two-click bot deployment in which users can select the bot they want and take it to production, thus empowering employees to build their own bots and simplifying the full-service customer experience.

“That was the appeal of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. We wanted a solution for internal customers who don’t have access to IT teams or developers to be able to build bots for themselves,” says Reese.