Microsoft Teams is a popular collaboration channel for enterprise leaders to facilitate exceptional employee interaction. Communication alone, MS Teams provides an intuitive UI experience that attracts every user to adapt to it easily and access critical information.

With MS Teams as one of your tech stacks, it is a very convenient way to get a virtual agent or MS Teams Bot for your ITSM platforms and integrate it into MS Teams. What you get is centralized service desk requests and seamless management of workplace support for IT and HR.

In this particular context, MS Teams bots aren’t those that we need to build from scratch. Instead, it is about using a virtual agent or MS Teams bot that can be integrated into MS Teams for your ITSM operations and get started faster.

Let’s know-how enterprise leaders can leverage Microsoft Teams Bots or Virtual Agents to enhance employee support and eliminate workplace challenges.

When we say Microsoft Teams Bots, it directly means a virtual agent or chatbot to be used within the MS Teams environment.Just as we interact in the MS Teams conversation interface, the bot provides similar conversational capability but with the power of natural language processing and natural language understanding to enable human-to-machine interaction and reduce the workloads on human agents to aid workplace support.Microsoft Teams bot can be built using Microsoft Bot Framework. There are two steps to building MS Teams Bots.

1. One is using MS Teams UI Kit

2. Another is using the bot developer SDK tool

To build your MS Teams Bot, you must have developer experience to work with various programming languages and other technicalities.No-code platforms that requires no developer tooling are convenient to start fast and take control of your service desk operations.Bots in Microsoft Teams may be used in a variety of ways, including:

• Conversational bots make sense in Teams since it's a chat-based collaboration tool—the only difference is that you're conversing with a machine instead of another human

• Initiate conversations with one person at a time or as a group chat channel.

• Users communicate with bots via text, interactive cards, and task modules, and interactions may vary from a basic search to a complicated AI-powered dialogue.

• By automating simple tasks, you can free up your team to focus on more complex problems.

• MS Teams Bot is easy to use, and you can create custom commands to suit your needs.

• MS Teams Bot is a great way to improve communication and collaboration in your workplace.

A Bot integrated into Microsoft Teams can answer basic enquiries, direct users to appropriate knowledge pages, generate support tickets, assist workers with easy to complicated tasks, and escalate requests to human agents when necessary, all while remaining inside Microsoft Teams.Employees can concentrate and sustain workflow by completing all requests while sitting in a single hub, rather than being distracted by several browser tabs or applications and tools.

Leveraging a no-code platform that cuts off all the steps to build in the MS Teams developer environment and applying critical developing skills is a respite to deal with months of test and trial while deploying the bot in MS Teams.

A platform like Workativ provides a no-code easy-to-download virtual agent builder or conversational chatbot builder to enable you to create your MS Teams Bot.

The virtual agent or conversational AI platform applies natural language understanding that extracts contexts and delivers the right response to alleviate the growing challenges of workplace support. With Workativ, you can have the flexibility to create app workflows for any Tier 1 support level functions and automate mundane workplace tasks through integration with any of the ITSM tools.

Workativ’s virtual agent deployment in your MS Teams makes it easy for enterprise leaders to facilitate self-service resolutions for employees and solve issues at scale.

When you have app workflow automation for ITSM functions via MS Teams Bot, your employees gain faster time to resolve issues.

It is a dual flexibility for your employees and ITSM teams who handle service requests. The best thing about self-service MS Teams Bot is that it eliminates the need to log into the service desk and raise an issue. It is highly likely to improve the adoption rate and reduce the risks of communicating with the service desk via a traditional method. As a result, your employees continue to attempt to improve digital transformation goals at the workplace.

Let’s see what you can do with MS Teams Bots to streamline workplace support with ITSM app workflow automation.

• Create a ticket - With app workflow automation syncing between your service desk and MS Teams chatbots, an ITSM manager can create a ticket within the chatbot if FAQs or other knowledge bases are short of adequate help.

• Self-serve help or request - By communicating with the MS Teams chatbot, users can get appropriate help or achieve new service requests easily without the help of human agents.

• Track status of tickets - Right within the Bot, your employees can track the status of the tickets without leaving MS Teams. It is easier to get updated information and take steps accordingly.

• Handover to agent - if self-service is not ample enough to autonomously solve workplace issues, employees can initiate agent handover and give the full context of the previous conversation.

MS Teams Bot integration with your ITSM tools makes handling multiple HR or IT operations easy. Here are the best use cases for enterprise leaders.

Password resets

Just by asking the MS Teams Bot to help with password resets, you can get instant help. You only need to provide your email id; the bot will surface a link for you to make the changes.

User provisioning

An app workflow automation for HR cloud platforms and Azure AD for your MS Teams Bot facilitate rapid user provisioning for a new hire without waiting for the manager to approve the request.

Printer issues

FAQs bots for MS Teams are convenient for handling printer issues such as paper jams or cartridge problems.

Unlock account

Common issues such as account locks are eating much of the productive time. App workflow automation can easily help users get out of a locked account.

Employee onboarding/offboarding

Using HR workflow automation for onboarding/offboarding reduces mundane workflows for HR teams and gives a seamless experience for new hires on the first day.

These are some of the examples of use cases that enterprise leaders can leverage for everyday workplace support.

MS Teams workflow bots built with Workativ conversational AI Platform can provide many ways to apply to unique use cases and take control of everyday mundane work processes through automation.

Initiate processes from conversations.

Teams bots are extremely beneficial if your company has internal business procedures. You'd want to start with a chat. Assume you want to ask, "How many paid leaves does each employee get each year?" That information is normally documented in a portal that consists of a numerical value.

Now the bot will search for it and respond to the query. There can also be more actionable requests: such as "Hey, I'd want to take next Monday off." "Could you please initiate that workflow or me?" Such requests generally require an approval procedure, but with MS Team Bots, you can link such systems and use it as a starting point for procedures instead of doing it manually. The bot can essentially handle all of this without the intervention of employees.

If creating your own bot is intimidating, no-code bot platforms like Workativ Assistant may assist you by taking care of some of the hard work.

Reduce IT workload by automating low-level support chores.

Bots may be programmed to handle a few basic instructions or more complicated AI-driven jobs. Changing passwords, setting up VPN, raising outage tickets, creating log reports, and updating customer or sales databases are just a few examples.

Employees may also use the Teams bot to streamline routine HR processes such as applying for leaves, sending asset change requests, scheduling meetings, and completing onboarding paperwork, among other things.

Instantly respond to employee inquiries - any time, any place!

An MS Teams bot may be used to answer questions like "How can I apply for a travel allowance?" Indeed, the ease with which workers can use the bot from inside Teams reduces fatigue and increases employee productivity.

Furthermore, the bot is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can handle many requests at once, saving the company money. Employees may ask questions from anywhere using the Teams app, whether at home, work, or elsewhere. If the bot fails, however, the system may swiftly bring in a human-in-the-loop by sending a real-time warning to subject-matter experts, who can then assist right away.

Whether there is a time zone difference or someone is sick, it makes no difference. It's absolutely scalable since you have a bot there. It may respond to as many inquiries as they come in.

Circulate Relevant Data Within Teams

Employee tiredness and burnout are reduced, and productivity is significantly improved. Thanks to the rapid and seamless finding of important information. MS Teams Bots can extract files, FAQs, documents, user manuals, and other material from the organization's internal network (essential business KPIs) and provide it inside Teams, eliminating the need to move between apps to complete tasks.

Send Personalized Notifications

Within Teams, bots can provide notifications and alerts (for instance, the latest policy updates, documents added to an existing project folder, scheduled downtime, etc.). These alerts are tailored to the individual's position, region, interests, and responsibilities. You can get the latest update on the policy that is under progress, the code your team is developing, the Organization's new rules regarding working from home, all this, and more just with the click of a button.

Other benefits include:

• Enhances the hybrid workforce's digital employee experience.

• Reduces employee burn-out and churn

• Reduces the cost of providing employee assistance at a large scale.

It just takes a few steps to start with MS Teams Bot for automating end-user support.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Sign up : Create a new bot or download pre-built bots from the marketplace.

2. Connect App Workflows : Workativ provides pre-built app integrations and workflows so you can instantly connect your chatbot with your app and automate tasks.

3. Test your bot in real time using “Try Me.” Make adjustments, add or edit conversations, fine-tune user interactions, and review your bot conversations on the go before you go live.

4. Deploy on Teams : Customize the end-user experience by applying your company branding, logo, etc.

Watch on YouTube to learn to build MS Teams Bot.

Watch the video for easy deployment of MS Teams Bot for workplace support automation.

Transform your workplace support with Workativ.

Workativ is a no-code interface solution enabling you to build comprehensive, intelligent, responsive conversational MS Team bots that sync with Microsoft Teams. We provide customization depending on your requirements to boost employee engagement and productivity and maximize ROI without needing a specialist development environment.

Schedule a demo today to enhance your workplace support.