A good beginning of Customer interaction or conversation is the basis of achieving customer engagement and loyalty. The moment your customer approaches you, he would like to get the basic information about the products or services directly from your customer support. The agility in customer handling will be impetus to his liking towards your organization. If you can create automatic conversational programs (BOT) within your CRM software, such as Dynamics CRM, which can predict the direction of the entire conversation on the basis of initial dialogs, you job is half done.

Why Microsoft Bot Framework?

The Microsoft Bot Framework is a comprehensive offering that allow the developers to build and deploy high quality bots for your users to enjoy their conversational experiences on for multiple conversational channels. The framework consists of the Bot Builder SDK, Bot Connector, Developer Portal, and Bot Directory. You can build a Bot with your own existing code using Bot Framework. You can use Bot Builder to generate conversational dialogs even from scratch. The Bot Framework Emulator is used to simulate the conversation, and this is how, it can be used to test your bot. Moreover, the developers need to develop the bot only once, and thereafter it can be deployed in many channels effortlessly.

The Framework supports many channels for conversational dialogs. A few of them are following:

1 . Text/ SMS

2. Office 365 mail

3. Skype (auto-configured)

4. Slack

5. GroupMe

6. Telegram

7. Facebook Messenger

8. Kik

9. Web (auto-configured, embeddable)

10. Direct Line (API to host your bot in your app)

How to implement Bot Framework?

In order to implement the Bot Framework conveniently, an API has been provided within Bot Connector library. This API aims to provide a conversational context. The Bot Builder library provides an ‘Activity; class with six types, namely- Message, conversationUpdate, contactRelationUpdate, typing, ping, deleteUserData. Each activity types enables the developer to create a conversation type.

Now, to start a meaningful conversation there are some useful concepts used as: Dialog, FormFlow and Luis.

Dialogs is the simplest conversational building block for Bot to communicate or reply. Here, the exchange of messages between bot and user is the primary channel for interaction with the outside world. This is implemented in a C# class that implements IDialog. Dialog is used as the starter of the entire conversation. Form Flow, is implemented for a collection of fields to be captured throughout the conversation.

With Dialog and Form Flow, the bot can handle basic conversations. For more complex conversations, the Framework utilizes LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service). This is the best part of this framework as it encapsulates the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning technologies. This makes the bot smarter, and helps in predicting the intent of the user.

Today is the era of the Conversational User Interface, or CUI, such as- email, text, cards, buttons or voice. These conversation-driven UI now enables us to do everything in our experience with digital world, whether grabbing a taxi, to conversing with customer care, among others. Here, Bots and conversation agents are increasingly playing the key roles, by facilitating users to interact as a service or application.

Here, by implementing Microsoft Bot Framework with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can enhance the user experience by enabling the conversation more like human-human conversation, and thus communicating the users the right message at the right time…in fact promptly.

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