Tip: Reduce customer/user wait time while a flow runs

[rishona_elijah]

You can use Call an action in Power Virtual Agents to let your chatbot run a process with Power Automate flows. Your flows can be as complex or simple as you like. But the longer your flow takes to run, the longer your customer is left waiting until they hear back from the bot. By moving the Return value(s) to Power Virtual Agents action earlier in the flow, you can reduce customer wait time by returning control to the chatbot earlier.

For example, the conversation below gets details from the customer to book a hair appointment.

There is a flow run during the conversation that performs a series of actions: Add a row in Dataverse, Post a message in Teams, Send an email. In the current flow set up, all these actions will need to be completed until the chatbot has control of the conversation again. That means that the customer is left waiting for the duration of the flow, likely wondering what is happening. And the longer the flow is, the longer the wait time. Return value(s) to Power Virtual Agents action determines when the chatbot should take control of the conversation again and continue chatting with the customer.

Return value(s) to Power Virtual Agents action can be moved earlier in the flow to reduce customer wait time. In this particular example, the 3 actions (Dataverse, Teams, Email) don’t require any value to be returned to chatbot. Thus, they can run in the background while the customer and bot continue their conversation. The flow would be better like this: