Building No-code Chatbots with Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Teams

A lot of us are already using Microsoft Teams for chatting with our colleagues or having virtual meetings. It’s the hub for your collaboration at work, and likely where you spend most of your day. But did you know that chat and video calls are only a small percentage of what Teams has to offer? It has much more incredible capabilities that can extend and transform how you work. One of its latest features is the ability to create and deploy our own no-code chatbot using Power Virtual Agents.

Power Virtual Agents is the tool of Microsoft’s Power Platform that enables you to easily create your own chatbot using a graphical, no-code interface. It’s easy for anyone – whether you come from a technical background or not – to get started on building your chatbot. You can deploy your chatbot to a range of different channels where your audience can interact with it, including your website, Facebook page, mobile apps and of course Microsoft Teams.

What can I do with the chatbot in Microsoft Teams?

Power Virtual Agents in Teams is ideal for your internal scenarios such as answering questions from your employees and colleagues or for managing IT support requests in your organisation. Staff can interact with the chatbot to get answers to commonly asked support questions and can even use it to automatically categorise and escalate support requests based on its nature.

HR-related use cases are another great example. How many times do staff ask about work from home or leave policies? You can build a chatbot that gives staff an instant answer to all their HR-related enquiries. Using Power Automate and the hundreds of data connectors, the chatbot can also take action for the employee. Need to submit a leave request? Let staff have the chatbot to handle it for them!

How can I get started?

You can build your chatbot using the Power Virtual Agents web app or – even better – build it within Microsoft Teams directly and have it deployed for your colleagues to use instantly. You can get started by the Power Virtual Agents Teams app to the channel of your choice. Once that’s done, you can then start building your chatbot. You can use the graphical interface to map out its conversation tree and call on flows that you can build with Power Automate. Once that’s ready, you can finally either publish it out for just yourself or to share among your colleagues!