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In digging into the tool, the first thing that comes to mind is that the conversation is really a series of logic trees where we lead and gather information to help get the user to the right nodes in the logic tree for their chat. It occurs to me that there are a number of ways to think about mapping out the process and how to arrange topics which encapsulate the processes. Is there some guidance for how we decompose the areas we plan to support in the bot? What is too much scope, what is too little or how to determine the 'right' scope for a topic?
Adding Joe Gill as he has a lot of background here
@JoeGill
Hi there,
That a tricky question as Virtual Agent is pretty new and people are just getting to grips with Virtual Agent. I would not worry too much about mapping out your process. Just start with some small Topics and see how you get on.
You are correct Topics are like logic tree and are conversational workflows. As you have seen when you create a Bot you get a series of out of the box Topics created for you such as opening hours. I would look at these for examples of what your are trying to do. You can either modify these or create your own. That said its likely you will delete most of them once you create your own Topics.
You should monitor you Bot Analytics regularly to see if you need to modify your Topic Trigger Phrases or the topic conversation.
It is also easy to use Flow to execute actions on external systems and I have done a blog post on this which may help
https://joegill.com/build-a-bot-with-virtual-agent-flow-and-cds/
I hope that helps. If you have any specific questions post them here
Joe
Thank you Joe!!
Hi there. We do have some guidance on our blog. You might enjoy these posts specifically:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2019/08/27/best-practices-when-planning-to-use-customer-service-bots/
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2019/08/13/build-a-better-bot-know-your-business-and-customers/
You may find you'll have to do a little bit of trial-and-error to find what works best for you as far as how granular topics should be, both in terms of how successfully your bot triggers the precise topics your customers are looking for and also how much complexity you can manage as an author. As a general rule, I'd first try keeping all the different variations of one conceptual topic (say, "How to pay" and all the instructions for the different payment methods) together in one topic with branching logic.
One caveat is that while you can send a user from one topic into another topic, you can't send them deep into the second topic, just to the top of it. So if for instance you think you'll need to send people from other topics into "Pay with debit card" then probably that would need to be its own topic rather than just a branch of "How to pay".
Best regards,
Kathy
Microsoft PVA team
This caveat is super helpful as are the links from you and Joe. Thank you both!!!
I think I have enough basis to start building out a framework, and like you both mentioned, it seems like a bit of trial and error will be in order.
Thanks
Joe P.
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