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The Set Up
While you have many choices for how to bring your service desk into Teams, AtBot provides the most complete solution to facilitate this integration. A bot in Teams offers users a friendly and intuitive way to ask for help. From being able to answer simple questions, drawing on your existing knowledge base, to providing step-by-step resolution instructions, and ultimately creating and assigning new service tickets for issues that the bot cannot resolve.
In this article, I will be expanding on the technical integrations that can empower your bot in Teams. ServiceNow, Microsoft Cognitive Services and the Power Platform, all brought together into a cohesive solution through AtBot. You can employ this strategy for any bot in Teams, not just your service desk, but for the sake of this article, we will be focusing on IT support.
What Makes a Good Bot
The main thing that makes a bot “good” is the fact that your users continue to use it. If the experience is poor, or users do not get value out of their interactions with the bot, then it will go unused. We believe that there are 3 pillars that breath life into your bot.
Language Understanding
The first pillar is the ability to understand natural language. The bot should not only understand what you are asking or trying to accomplish, but also any key components of your ask that are relevant. For example, if a user states, “I need to have Visio installed on my laptop”, the bot should understand that they need a software installation and that Visio is the software they are in need of.
This capability is accomplished through AtBot’s integration with Microsoft LUIS or Language Understanding Intelligent Service. LUIS is an easy-to-use language modelling service that can be leveraged to give your bots a deep understanding of the natural language that would be used within your organization to ask for services (like software installation).
Knowledge
The second pillar is the bot’s ability to respond to questions with knowledgeable answers. AtBot employs a direct connection to Microsoft QnA Maker to give your bots a knowledge base that can be derived from existing content or managed directly in the QnA Maker portal.
This knowledge base empowers your bot to answer questions with static content like “What is the guest WIFI password” or, “what are the service desk hours?”.
Action
The final pillar of any good bot is its ability to take action on the users’ behalf. Whether it is to create a new incident for the user in ServiceNow or to look up the status of a ticket, the bot should be fully capable of doing these things for the user.
This capability is provided through AtBot’s integration with Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps. AtBot has a standard connector in each of these RPA platforms which allows you to create skills for the bot without having to write any code. This is where our integration with ServiceNow comes in as ServiceNow is an out-of-the-box connector as well. If you can create a flow, you can program your bot using AtBot!
Your 24/7 Tier 1 Support Agent
When you put all this together, you can quickly configure, build, and deploy a bot to Teams which can provide support to your users throughout all hours of the day. The built-in integration with ServiceNow means that your existing flow for incidents can be leveraged and the bot can create and route new tickets accordingly.
The video below is an example of an IT support bot that was built using AtBot to combine the powers of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Power Automate, Teams and ServiceNow. This bot took about 6 hours to build from start to finish.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-RfpRVsm030
Conclusion
If your organization is using Teams for communication and collaboration, now is the time to start looking at integrating other services through bots and application integrations. ServiceNow is one great example, but through Power Automate you can integrate with other systems as well. From Dynamics to SharePoint, FreshDesk to Azure SQL, integrating with your data is as simple as placing a block inside the flow and making the connection. This is all made possible by the AtBot platform, the no-code solution for building bots for Teams.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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