Simplifying bot authoring and insights
In my first role at Microsoft, I managed a team of 8 multi-disciplinary designers on a new offering. Virtual Agent for Customer Service sought to simplify the creation and deployment of customer service bots through a flow-based diagramming language (one of the first of it’s kind). Our intended users were customer service agents who, with very little training, could automate support topics.
In partnership with PM and Engineering (as well as Microsoft’s Bot Framework team), we worked through specific user scenarios including:
Creating and managing a library of bot scripts to handle CS cases
Connecting to product data and injecting variables
Error handling, handover to humans and feedback mechanisms
Defining custom metrics to help understand bot engagement
Examples of bot dashboards and visual authoring flows.
Virtual Agent was my introduction to Conversation Design. The solution relied on a flow-based, deterministic approach to conversation compared to today’s probabilistic approach with LLMs. The Virtual Agent product became Power Virtual Agent which paved the way for Copilot Studio.