When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold across the world, many of our partners and customers started integrating technology in innovative ways to keep up with increased demand for critical services from a remote work environment. The no-code chatbot authoring experience of Power Virtual Agents helps organizations quickly build and publish chatbots to connect with their key audiences.
By using conversations as an interface, chatbots allow you to engage more deeply with your users, automatically handle routine tasks, and answer questions at scale with 24×7 coverage, freeing up time for your employees to dedicate their time to focus on other tasks.
We know that technology is only part of a holistic solution and we are proud to assist organizations working on addressing the challenges introduced by COVID-19 with their critical mission where we can. Here are a few examples of the amazing value that’s being built on top our platform.
Government of India
Part of the Digital India initiative, MyGov is a citizen-centric platform set up to enable people to connect with the Government.
The Government of India in partnership with Accenture India and Microsoft built a COVID-19 Health Assistant to help offload some of the surge in requests and questions the Government is getting from the public related to COVID-19. The chatbot, named Saathi, is built on Power Virtual Agents and supports a wide variety of topics to assist the public in India with information about both national and regional news, services and guidelines.
You can see the Saathi chatbot here: https://self4society.mygov.in/
City of Kobe, Japan
City of Kobe has a population of 1.57 million. As COVID-19 spread across Japan, the city was facing time-sensitive and critical challenges. City officials of Kobe were urgently searching for solutions that could help respond to the high volume of enquiries and provide citizens with a more efficient interface for accessing information related to COVID-19 and about cases in the city.
City of Kobe decided to leverage the Power Platform to help address the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 self checker chatbot is built on Power Virtual Agents and handles requests and questions from citizens about COVID-19.
Tsuyoshi Ito is a city officer in Kobe whose primary role is to identify IT governance and strategy for the city. He started learning about the Power Platform and quickly built the Power Virtual Agents chatbot.
“I could develop all these solutions within weeks because Power Platform makes it so easy and intuitive to do so.” – Tsuyoshi Ito
City of Kobe is one of the early adopters of the expanded language support in Power Virtual Agents and has already built a Japanese version of their COVID-19 self checker chatbot. You can see it here:
https://www.city.kobe.lg.jp/kenko/health/infection/kobe_bot/index.html
Swansea Council Domestic Abuse Hub
Swansea Council’s Domestic Abuse Hub is tasked with providing safety advice and emotional support to those who need it throughout the coronavirus crisis.
“At a time when people are being encouraged to stay in their homes in order to keep safe, it is more important than ever to recognise that not every home is a safe place.” – Megan Stevens, Swansea Council
With a noticeable increase in cases of domestic abuse during the lockdown, Swansea Council decided to build a chatbot on Power Virtual Agents as a new way to connect with people at risk. The chatbot is part of a solution to address domestic abuse by providing easy access to safety advice, contextual information, and signposting to local and national support services.
You can see the domestic abuse chatbot You Are Not Alone here:
https://www.swansea.gov.uk/YouAreNotAlone
More to come…
Check back in here again soon. We’ll update this post with more stories about our partners and customers working on integrating technology solutions to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
