The first chatbot was programmed in 1966, when MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA. With just a couple hundred lines of code, Weizenbaum was able to briefly convince some observers that there was a human on the other side of the conversation. The key word there is “briefly,” because before long, ELIZA’s obvious limitations would be exposed.
In his paper about the experiment, Weizenbaum said:
“In artificial intelligence, machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer. Once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures.”
In the decades since ELIZA, and especially in the last few years, chatbots have become far more sophisticated. Generative AI means that they’re no longer “a mere collection of procedures” — now, they train on extremely large data sets that allow them to hold a more convincingly realistic conversation while also “learning” and improving their capabilities.
With Microsoft Power Platform’s Power Virtual Agents, you can create AI-powered chatbots that can effortlessly handle low-level customer inquiries, freeing up your team to focus on more complex tasks that call for the human touch. And you can do it without writing a single line of code.
Using Power Platform’s simple, easy-to-use creation tools, you can build a chatbot that cleanly integrates with your ERP, CRM or just about any other tech platform your company uses. On the customer service side, your chatbot can be trained on product information and customer data to perform routine tasks like answering frequently asked questions, providing order status updates and helping customers access account information. These tasks may be simple, however, they still take time, and that time can add up in a hurry. By allowing your custom chatbots to perform them instead, your human customer service reps will have more time and energy to address higher-level (and thus higher-impact) tickets.
Virtual Agents can also be useful for internal purposes. You can set them up to access databases for company policies, best practices and other useful information, and then serve as reliable assistants to help your employees get work done.
Power Virtual Agents already have a proven track record of success with a wide variety of clients. They helped the Miami Dolphins of the NFL successfully resolve 97 percent of more than 40,000 customer inquiries. Their service agents were then able to focus on giving the other three percent the best customer service experience possible.
The Japanese city of Kobe used Power Virtual Agents to handle FAQs from citizens in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when uncertainty was high, the city was able to build a Virtual Agent in less than two weeks and use it to get the right resources to thousands of people.
Price Waterhouse Coopers was able to build multiple Virtual Agent chatbots to help their team members quickly search internal content repositories in SharePoint, Confluence and even Google Drive, in turn making the audit experience more efficient and improving other processes as well.
[H2] Let Enavate Help You Build Your Virtual Agents
Microsoft Power Platform is only getting more powerful. If your company could benefit from Virtual Agents, we can help you figure out where to start or how to implement the Power Platform in your tech stack.