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somanyusernames
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is PVA suitable for my requirements - answering sales guys questions

hi, i saw another post like this so hoping people might be able to save me some time/effort.

 

mostly I'm looking for a cheap way to have a bot automatically gather some info from my sales guys leads, and turn them into a CSV somewhere a CRM app we're looking at using can get to. I'd accept an email with the results of the questions from the bot. in the much longer term, I'd like to have it answer some basic repeated support questions that he asks on behalf of customers. it'd mostly be sending him links to PDFs (or sending PDFs if that's possible). it really needs to just respond to his keywords and give him back the info he needs before he bothers me for things i've already emailed him yesterday. 

 

from what I can determine, getting the sales guy (or his customers) to speak to a skype bot would make it easiest for him (and thus me). it'd be nice to include it on the website but not trying to automate myself out of work either and i think i could do that. 

 

there aren't that many leads to deal with. maybe 5 a week in the busy cases (but there is hope that will ramp up). as such I'm not sure we can afford PVA but we do have MSDN and there are developers in another office. I'm not a developer though so far this afternoon I'm making PVA do what I need* but since I was hitting the point where I needed to consult the docs, I thought i'd check the forums too, and saw someone else asking a similarish question and hoped maybe it wouldn't hurt if i asked too? 

 

i really hope this post hasn't broken too many rules and appreciate any advice anyone can offer. i'm mostly an overworked tech with enough things to keep me busy but this seemed interesting and useful and so far hasn't needed code 🙂 

 

thank you. 

 

 

* - my biggest stumbling block so far is asking for a timezone and not wanting to type out the options manually. 

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
renatoromao
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

Hi @somanyusernames ,

 

Yes, you can do it using Power Virtual Agents.

But depends on your features that you want to implement, like search in the database and return to the user, you can use Power Automate. If this search was very complex and Power Automate cannot help you, you can use the Bot Framework to implement the Artificial Intelligence and improve your chatbot conversation.

 

I recommend you to talk with a specialist company to draw the architecture of your project and see what technologies do you need.


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Renato Romão,

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Power Virtual Agents course (+3.250 students) : English | Português

Hi Renato,

 

thanks for your reply. unfortunately we're a very very small team and there's no way I'd be given any budget to talk to a specialist consulting company. 

 

thinking about this, really I'm trying to solve a person issue with technology, and really if he wasn't in management, we'd just tell them to use the file structure or search his outlook like everyone else does. Since he is management and likes Skype this seemed like a good way to stop him bugging the rest of us who are working and can search for information in the normal methods. it might not be the best tool for the job but it might be too. I guess that's what I'm trying to find out. 

 

I had a look at Power Automate . It did seem a way to get some information (from the chats) into a new CRM we're looking at but at this point but most of our company data doesn't live in the MS ecosystem. Currently the data he needs mostly exists in PDFs or an internal wiki but he doesn't like to read or search. There's no KB to mine from. very few Q+A type answers. it's mostly complicated steps in PDFs. 

 

I could probably get away with a fancy IVR system just to return files but then he probably wouldn't use it and this seemed interesting to learn about while i looked for a solution. 

 

thanks

 

renatoromao
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

Hi @somanyusernames ,

 

Unfortunately, the technologies are not a hundred percent right, some bots and artificial intelligence needs to be little wish or effort of the user to read and search for something.

 

You can create an intelligent chatbot that does a big part of your wish, but you need to have a developer knowledge or pay a consultant company.


Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution!
Thanks!

Renato Romão,

Connect with me here 😉

Power Virtual Agents course (+3.250 students) : English | Português

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