Easily Build Intelligent Conversational IVR and Voice-Bots with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a bot framework for creating bots easily, without having to put data scientists or specialist developers on your payroll. It empowers everyone to build powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by their customers, other employees or visitors to their website or service.

Chatbot or Voice-Bot?

Nowadays, most implementations for PVA and other bot frameworks are textual chatbots. But here are some questions that are definitely worth pondering. Are you familiar with the growing trend towards voice-bots? Did you know that you can take your chatbot and connect it to voice and telephony? And, most importantly, can you imagine how that would change your customers’ experience for the better?

For the purposes of illustration, let's take a look at some common real-life use cases:

• A customer calls your contact center, a bot answers the call immediately, asks for details and tries to solve the customer’s problem. If the bot can’t solve it, the call is transferred, along with the customer's details, to a live agent who continues the call until resolution is reached.
• A bot replaces a tedious old school IVR system, where the customers navigate for minutes between different menus. Here, a bot answers the call, asks who the customer wants to speak to, and routes the call accordingly.
• A bot is not directly exposed to the customer, but listens to the call and assists the agent in real-time. This achieves greater first call resolution, reduces training time, and saves costs.

As you can see, the humble voice-bot can be your secret ingredient for delivering a better experience whenever a customer calls your contact center.

When PVA Meets VoiceAI Connect

So how can you get started as easily as possible? First, try to play with Microsoft PVA and build your own chatbot. After you’ve created it, you’ll probably start asking yourself: “How will I connect it to voice and telephony? Isn’t it way too complicated?”

In the past, that answer would have been an emphatic “yes”, but there’s an ace up the AudioCodes sleeve to make the whole process exceptionally simple and easy, right from the off. Just visit the AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect cloud application, get a free credit to receive a phone number and connect it to your chatbot with just a few clicks. Your chat bot is then ready and waiting to receive calls – it really is that easy.

If you like what you’ve heard so far, check out our VoiceAI Connect page and find out more about today’s exciting UX challenges and opportunities. And if you’d like to talk to one of our (human!) experts, feel free to drop us a line!