Workforce Virtual Agent

The recent events in the United States with respect to the COVID-19 health emergency has caused massive unemployment.  As a result of this, some six hundred Workforce Boards, which are public and non-profit organizations to assist with job seeking, professional development and many other services have become overwhelmed as hundreds of thousands of people require their services.  The Workforce Virtual Agent is designed to reduce the load of requests by using Artificial Intelligence from Microsoft to provide a sophisticated presence on the Workforce Board website which can interact with visitors, answers questions and direct people seeking help to the appropriate resources – all without the presence of staff at the Workforce Board. 

For situations in which the visitor to the website cannot find the answer through interaction with the Virtual Agent, there is a hand-off process from Microsoft Power Virtual Agent to the Live Agent, which is the staff at the Workforce Board.  The process is seamless, and the entire previous conversation with the Virtual Agent is displayed in the Omnichannel dashboard after the Agent accepts the handoff notice.  Once the handoff is accepted, the Live Agent simply takes over from where the chat conversation left off. 

The deployment of this solution in Workforce Boards has resulted in as much as 70% of load reduction by staff at the Board responsible for fielding telephone requests.