Extending Power Virtual Agent with Power Automate and SharePoint You might have read my beginner-level step-by-step kick-starters and might have implemented Caller ID detection in your bot. This article is here to dig a little bit deeper and demonstrate how to use data to personalize the customer journey within the bot. to create your first (voice-) bot CRM Motivation With the integration capabilities of Power Automate, your can take the next step in your digital customer service journey. Using CRM data can be used to make automated voice bot conversations more personal and relevant to your customer. Power Virtual Agents-based (voice-) bots There is no need to annoy your customer and ask for details you already know. Automating repetitive processes frees human experts to take care of more complex tasks and customer interactions. Power Virtual Agents is not just another chatbot platform. It is part of a whole ecosystem with frontend, backend, and middleware layers to help you to do more with less and to speed up your digitalization journey. SharePoint List as a data source In this guide, I will use a simple SharePoint list as a data source for your bot's "CRM" Data. Other data sources can be used accordingly. Create a simple list with the following columns: title, name, surname, phonenumber, customernumber Power Automate flow to fetch customer data Next, we create a new Power Automate flow to fetch the calling customers' data from the list; we use the caller's phone number - we already extracted it from the channel data - as input for the flow. First, we define "phonenumber" as an input in Power Automate: Figure 3: Input variable Next, we initialize four variables as temporary storage for our CRM data. Next, the "get details from (SharePoint) list" action fetches the calling customers' data. The Filter Query is to select the data of the calling customer. We use the phone number as an index. phonenumber eq 'phonenumber' "value": [ { "@odata.etag": "\"2\"", "ItemInternalId": "3", "ID": 3, "Title": "Mr", "name": "Holger", "surname": "Imbery", "phonenumber": "+49xxxxxxxxx", "customernumber": "4477", .... } ] The array we get as an output of that step will be used to append the created variables via "Apply to each". Usage of CRM Data The data we acquired from our SharePoint list is stored in "bot." variables; therefore, the variable and its content are available globally. It can be used in every (new) topic. There is no need to ask for the following: name, surname title phone number customer number or all other information you find in your data sources. You can use speaker verification systems like to verify the user's identity. You will then have two factors, Caller ID and confirmed identity via voice. Nuance Gatekeeper or Phonexia Voice Verify Assets of all Power Automate connectors list of all Microsoft published connectors list SharePoint Connector Featured Image by on Unsplash Andrew Neel Also published here.
