Power Virtual Agents + Omnichannel: Delivering an even better together experience

Chatbots are quickly becoming a common part of CIOs strategies to drive efficiencies. A trend that has further been accelerated by the pandemic.

Chatbots have many use cases, starting from internal onboarding bots all the way to marketing tools to help with conversion. We have particularly seen them helpful when it comes to customer service.

Chatbots make it possible for any company to provide help to customers 24/7 without the need to have a global human agent network and hence provide immediate help to customers and relief for support agents.

We see these trends firsthand and that’s why we are heavily investing in making our integration with Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service better with every release.

This month we have some big news to share.

Integrated licensing

Power Virtual Agents sessions now come included in Omnichannel licenses. Every customer that purchases Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service (Digital Messaging or Chat licenses) gets Power Virtual Agents sessions to get started with their journey to world-class customer service solution.

Learn more about the licensing updates in Dynamics 365 licensing guide.

Making it easier to get started

Dynamics 365 Omnichannel now has new first run experience during which Power Virtual Agents bots get automatically created, linked to the Omnichannel hub and added to the right workstream and queues making it extremely simple to get started on your journey to automation.

Go to your Omnichannel engagement hub and try it out now!

Figure 1: Power Virtual Agents bot created as part of Omnichannel first run experience

Making PVA and Omnichannel work better together

We have also been busy making sure the two products work well together and shipped several improvements in the area in the past month.

We made it possible to use context shared from Omnichannel to be used directly in Power Virtual Agents from the very first message. This way you can personalize customer’s experience even more seamlessly. Learn more about context passing.

We have heard your feedback about making sure that conversations that don’t get escalated to human agents get auto closed in Omnichannel. We have now updated the bots so that they close conversations when the conversation times out after 30 minutes of inactivity.

There has been more goodness happening over the past several months including improvements to reliability and bug fixes.

We’re excited to have you on the journey with us as we continue to make the integration between Power Virtual Agents and Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service the best there is!