Creating and Using a Knowledgebase with Agents and Bots in Dynamics 365

Create and then make use of the extensive Knowledgebase to optimize customer experience with agents and (voice-) bots.

Motivation

To ensure consistent and compliant customer support, consider implementing a knowledge base with frequently asked questions. However, customers may still need to wait for an available agent even if their query is answered in the knowledge base. By utilizing a voice bot or chatbot to handle simpler inquiries, agents can focus on complex issues that require a human touch. It's important to offer a way to connect with a human agent in case of unexpected problems.

Create Knowledgebase Articles

Use the Dynamics 365 Customer Service function Knowledge base to create articles for frequent customer queries and automatically translate them to every language you serve your customers in.

Enable your (voice-) bots to use the Knowledgebase

Use a topic to access the Knowledgebase, e.g., the fallback topic, and create a new action.

You will find a template called "Search Dynamics 365 knowledge article flow," which we can use and modify when you have installed the Dynamics 365 Customer Service extensions for Power Virtual Agents.

• Select this template, create a copy, and make the needed connections to use the "Dataverse" and the "Content Conversion" Connector.

  
  

The flow itself is self-explaining and ready to use for text-based chatbots but will not give a good voice channel experience; this is the reason for creating a copy of it.

• Open the flow with edit and search for "Process each article in search result"

• Open it and jump to "Append title to article text result"

  
  

• remove everything but the variable "title"

• This will remove some nice formatting and a markdown based on "heading 2" which we cannot use in the voice channel.

  
  

• save the result and update the ‘call an action’ node in your Power Virtual Agents topic.

• Place the filter string into the input part, "statecode eq 3" and it will give only published articles back.

• You will find three new variables to textResult, jsonResult, and articleCount as the power Automate Flow output.

• Place textResult in a message node to read the search result to the caller in the voice channel.

  
  

Do not forget to end the new topic with a redirect to EndofConversation.

Troubleshooting

If the Power Automate flow ends in a dead end, check if Dataverse search is enabled.

• Goto Power Platform admin center

• Select your environment.

• Goto Setting

• Select features and check "Search"

  
  

Conclusion

You can make more with less! Having knowledge base articles about solving customers' queries is a first step. Still, by making them accessible for a (voice-) bot in front of your contact center, you reduce the customer's waiting time on the phone or in the chat and take the load from agents answering frequently asked questions.

Also published here.