As I continue to learn more and more about Power Platform, I
have been intrigued by Power Virtual Agent.
However, I have not spent too much time with it because I could never
come up with a business scenario around Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply. Whenever I think about a “Bot”, I think about
the annoying little boxes that pop up on some websites trying to help me, and I
just could not think of how I would use that with D365.
Recently as I was reading through various blogs, I learned I
did not need a website to use Power Virtual Agent. I could use the Bot inside of Microsoft
Teams. I also ran across an article from
Henrik Marx Larsen https://henrikmarxlarsen.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/creating-a-customer-service-bot-for-dynamics-365-for-finance-and-operations-using-power-virtual-agents/
where he created a customer service bot with Dynamics 365. I decided I would try to create a Sales
Assistant to quickly answer some common questions that the sales team might ask
the accounting team.
My goal was to create a Bot that could quickly retrieve
information about customers from Dynamics 365 Finance, specifically the
Accounts Receivables module.
·
Customer Phone Number
·
Customer Primary Contact
·
Customer Balance
·
Customer Credit Limit
·
Customer Aging Information
Now that I understand the topics, I would like the Bot to
handle, I am ready to get started.
Getting Started
To get started I created a trial account for Power Virtual
Agents at www.powerva.microsoft.com,
and created a new bot.
Power Virtual Agents creates the Bot with some basic topics
including a standard greeting. I decided
to start by creating my different topics.
Creating a topic to get information from Dynamics 365
Finance
Step 1 – From topic screen – New Topic
Step 2 – Create trigger phases and description to the topic
Step 3 – Design topic in the authoring canvas
In the authoring canvas you will plan out the flow of the
Bot, including how the Bot will respond, what questions it will ask, and how it
will get the answers to the questions.
A. Enter the message the BOT will return after the
trigger phrase
B. For the BOT to answer the question, it will need more information. In this case, it will need the Customer Name, so you need to add a question to ask for the information.
C. Now that the BOT has the customer name, it needs to go to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations to find the customer phone number. This is done using a step of "Call an action" which uses a Power Automate Flow.
D. Create a Flow to take the input of the Customer
Name, find the record in Dynamics 365 and return the Phone Number and any other
fields you are interested in.
E. Once the Flow is created with the final step
returning values to Power Virtual Agent, save the flow and return to Power
Virtual Agent. Confirm the Power
Automate inputs gets value from the input variable created above when it asked
for the customer name.
F. Now that the info is available, the next step is
to have the BOT return a message with the response. The variables can be part of the response.
G. The final step of the topic is to close it
out. This can be done multiple ways,
including a message saying goodbye, a redirect to another topic, or possibly
another question.
Step 4 – Design next topic in the authoring canvas
Continue in the authoring canvas designing topics until the
BOT covers the topics required.
Step 5 – Deploy the BOT to Microsoft Teams
After the authoring is complete – be sure to save the
BOT. The next step is to Publish the BOT
Once the BOT is published you can share the BOT with team
member and configure channels. Microsoft
Teams is a Channel.
Simply select Microsoft Teams and turn the BOT in on
Teams. This will add the BOT as a
channel in Teams.
The BOT is now available for you to open in Microsoft
Teams. To share with other team members,
it will need to be submitted for admin approval.
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