Overview of bots

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Contact Center—embedded, Dynamics 365 Contact Center—standalone, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Important

Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio following significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations across Microsoft Copilot.

Some articles and screenshots might refer to Power Virtual Agents while we update documentation and training content.

A bot is a program that provides automated responses in a conversational manner to a customer. It can also help resolve customer queries by using case deflection. A bot can also collect basic information from a customer and then provide it to a customer service agent to work further on the issue raised by the customer.

A bot eases the load on your customer service agents by handling basic queries. This saves your agents' time so they can work on more complex issues. You can configure your bots to escalate a query to a human agent as required, or when requested by the customer.

In Omnichannel for Customer Service, you can integrate both Azure and Copilot Studio bots to perform tasks like starting a conversation with the customer, providing automated responses, and then transferring the conversation to a human agent, as required.

Integrate Azure and Copilot Studio bots

When you integrate bots with Omnichannel for Customer Service, you get the following capabilities:

  • Seamlessly integrate your bots with chat and social channels without needing to add channel-specific code in the bot.
  • Transfer chat conversations from bots to human agents, together with the full context of the conversation.
  • Analyze the bot transcript that's available in Microsoft Dataverse after the conversation is completed.
  • Configure routing rules to selectively route incoming requests to bots based on context, such as issue type or customer type. For example, you can route low-complexity issues to bots, or route the conversation to a sales or support bot based on the web browsing history of the customer.
  • Monitor bot conversations in real time by using the supervisor dashboard, which includes details such as customer sentiment.
  • Use historical dashboards to get insights into the effectiveness of the bots through metrics such as resolution rate, escalation rate, resolution time, escalation time, and average sentiment.
  • Configure post-call surveys to measure customer satisfaction.

Bot sessions and licensing
Integrate an Azure bot
Integrate Copilot Studio bot
Configure Copilot Studio bot for voice