Use case: Automatically answer HR FAQs with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

With its extensive set of duties, HR is oftentimes one of the busiest departments in an organization. So the last thing that HR staff want to be doing is answering the same employee questions over and over again. To ease the burden, Cegeka has used Microsoft Power Virtual Agents to build an app that is able to respond automatically to HR FAQs.

The challenge

At one of our clients, HR staff found that they were spending far too many hours per week responding to recurring employee questions. Indeed, for each question, an HR employee had to:

• correctly interpret the request or ask for additional input,
• manually look up and retrieve the relevant information,
• and then formulate a clear and complete answer by e-mail.

Cegeka came to the rescue, helping our client to find a faster, more efficient way to answer HR FAQs.

The approach

To solve the problem, we used Microsoft Power Virtual Agents – or as we like to call it: a chatbot on Power Platform steroids.

During the initial development phase, we asked our client to compile a list of commonly asked questions, which we then scripted into a set of scenarios in order to build the chatbot. This was then embedded into a newly developed HR application, which works as follows:

• Whenever an employee has a question, he asks it via the app's Q&A module.
• Power Virtual Agents then activates the right scenario and, if needed for 'complex' or data related actions, prompts Microsoft Power Automate to automatically look up the requested information and send it to the employee.
• If the question isn’t linked to an existing scenario, Power Virtual Agents will then connect the employee to an HR staff member.
  
  

The results

The new HR app has meant a huge relief for the staff in our client’s HR department. From now on:

• every question that is linked to an existing scenario can be answered automatically. What’s more, there is no limit to the number of scenarios, which means that virtually any Q&A flow can be automated.
• in the event that the chatbot is unable to answer a particular question, the employee is quickly referred to an HR staff member.
• employees are able to ask questions and follow up on the answers via one central application.
  
  

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