ChatGPT for Customer Service – what is it and why should you care?
The hype surrounding ChatGPT started with a murmour at the end of 2021, before building into a crescendo last December when Open AI finally released a working version to the public.
While debate continues to rage about whether or not ChatGPT can be described as an AI application, it undoubtedly has the capacity to improve the delivery of customer service and change how brands interact online with their consumers.
At the heart of ChatGTP is machine learning, which underpins a number of interactive live chat platforms and features that help to ease the burden placed on human agents. But what are the primary advantages of this chatbot application, why should you look to integrate it into your business model?
Hans Siebum, Managing Director at Salesupply, an ecommerce fulfillment company, discusses how ChatGPT can be used for customer service.
What is ChatGPT and its Primary Advantages
ChatGPT (which may also be referred to as Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is a chatbot that was designed by OpenAI towards the end of last year.
A relatively recent addition to the interactive chatbot market, ChatGPT was built on top of OpenAI’s selection of large language models, which borrow heavily from supervised and reinforcement learning principles.
As a result, ChatGPT is a highly evolved and sophisticated piece of technology, and one that has begun to elevate the delivery of AI-driven customer support to an entirely new level.
This design has created an incredibly capable and intuitive model, and one that delivers numerous features to users. These include:
- #1. Allows for Organic and Conversational Interactions: Typically, basic AI chatbots are designed to answer simple and relatively binary questions. While ChatGPT can also resolve generic queries, it has also been modelled to interact in a more natural and conversational manner. In this respect, it replicates one of the core elements of human interaction, which is central to the delivery of effective and empathetic support in the real world.
- #2. It Allows for Follow-up Questions and the Recognition of Errors: ChatGPT’s conversational model is built on a dialogue format, which allows for more immersive customer interactions that reflect real-world conversations. For example, the software allows conversations to progress through its ability to answer follow-up questions from customers. At the same time, it’s capable of recognising and admitting errors in real-time, which can prove crucial in ensuring that customers receive accurate information at all times.
- #3. It Can Reject Inappropriate Requests: In addition to recognising errors and mistakes that are generated by the software, the ChatGPT software can also challenge incorrect premises or assertions by customers. This can help to correct customer misconceptions or clarify points of policy, potentially preventing queries from escalating into conflict. By the same token, ChatGPT can also identify and reject inappropriate requests. So, although the software is far from perfect and is known to produce incorrect answers and information at times, it’s also possible to leverage your own data to train ChatGPT so that it understands and responds more effectively to specific queries.
Why You Should Integrate ChatGPT Into Your Business Model
These features translate into important and strategic advantages for businesses, particularly those are customer oriented and continuing to scale at an exponential pace.
So, let’s take a closer look at some of these advantages and ask why they should convince you to integrate the technology into your business and customer service models.
#1. Improve Your Customer Service and Productivity
On a fundamental level, ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities make it well-equipped to comprehend even relatively complex customer requests, before providing informed and accurate responses.
As we’ve touched on, its dialogue format also allows for personalized and human responses, which in turn translates into improved engagement levels, superior (and more relevant) service and more opportunities to upsell and optimise the value of individual customers.
More broadly speaking, the multifunctional nature of ChatGPT can also lead to greater levels of productivity within your customer service teams and the business as a whole. Certainly, you can leverage the software to automate a wide range of tasks, such as the creation of email responses, essays and individual lines of code.
For example, you can use ChatGPT to create generic FAQ content for your self service portal, or email templates and scripts for your agents.
These are perfunctory but important tasks that may be central to the delivery of customer service at a consistently high level, and having the ability to automate them effectively frees up the time of your agents to focus on more generative and strategically critical work.
Interestingly, you can also have ChatGTP run your chatbot function, while using its AI tool for producing deeper and more insightful analytics of the current customer service request.
More specifically, the tool can analyse individual request data and subsequently create a detailed category model. As you build new and relevant categories over time, you can further train your chatbot and develop more informed responses, creating incremental improvements to your customer service delivery over time.
#2. Leverage the Synergy Between Marketing and Customer Service
In the digital age, businesses have begun to understand the unique synergy between marketing and customer service, with the former focused on identifying and engaging customers and the latter largely responsible for retaining them and upselling products.
As we’ve already touched on, the use of ChatGPT and this type of software can help to automate basic customer service tasks and training documents, while enabling experienced agents to focus on optimising customer retention levels and upselling key products or services.
Even from a practical perspective, ChatGPT can be deployed to create promotional (or blog) articles and social media posts.
This would represent a practical contribution to your business’s marketing campaigns, and the creation of low-level content for specific promotional channels.
#3. Embrace Scalable Technology Through ChatGPT
If your business is growing and scaling at an exponential rate, it’s crucial that your technology and infrastructure keeps pace with this.
Make no mistake; ChatGPT was designed to be inherently scalable, despite the fact that it’s not open source by nature.
In fact, it’s ability to automate tasks and ease the burden placed on customer service agents (either by reducing the number of in-person interactions or allowing agents to focus on a smaller number of more complex tasks).
Such scalability also translates into reduced costs and the superior deployment of labour, while potentially aiding employee retention rates over time.
The Last Word
As you can see, ChatGPT is an advanced and intuitive AI application, and one that can have positive implications for customer service and other elements of your business venture.
However, it’s important that AI programs shouldn’t be used to completely automate your customer service delivery, as it’s important to retain elements of human interaction and deploy labour to handle more strategic tasks.
Instead, focus on using ChatGPT to automate rudimentary customer service and marketing tasks, while also optimising scalability and reducing long-term operational costs.
