Wherever you look today, it seems as though everyone is trying to work ChatGPT and other conversational AI into their business processes. But one field that’s been leading the way for integrating artificial intelligence is customer support, thanks to how AI can assist agents and improve the customer experience.
With that comes many questions and concerns; will AI make human agents obsolete? Can businesses trust AI to provide their customers with accurate information? And how can ChatGPT improve the customer experience?
To answer those questions, we looked at how businesses are using ChatGPT for their customer communications and the impact it has on CX.
How AI Can Improve CX (According to ChatGPT)
We’re already seeing businesses integrate AI into their contact centers and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Five9 has started using ChatGPT to provide AI Insights and AI Summaries, while Salesforce recently announced Einstein GPT, an AI designed for its CRM application to create personalized content across Salesforce. So what, exactly, can AI like ChatGPT do?
To get an understanding of how ChatGPT can help the customer experience, we started by asking ChatGPT itself. It answered:
As an AI language model, I can be used to improve CX (customer experience) in several ways, including:
Customer Service: I can be integrated into customer service channels such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and email support systems to provide faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries. This can help improve customer satisfaction and reduce the workload of customer service representatives.
Language Translation: I can be used to translate messages and documents between customers who speak different languages. This can help expand the reach of a company to a global audience and ensure that everyone can receive support in their preferred language.
Sentiment Analysis: I can be used to analyze customer feedback, including reviews, social media posts, and customer service interactions, to identify trends and sentiments. This can help companies understand their customers better and tailor their products and services to meet their needs.
Personalization: I can be used to personalize the customer experience by analyzing customer data and providing personalized recommendations and content. This can help build customer loyalty and increase sales.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: I can be integrated into chatbots or virtual assistants that can help answer common questions or perform routine tasks, freeing up customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues.
Overall, my language capabilities can help improve CX by providing faster and more accurate customer support, expanding the reach of a company to a global audience, providing personalized recommendations and content, and improving customer sentiment analysis.
These are all good uses for AI in contact center and customer support environments. So good, in fact, that companies have been using them since before ChatGPT was introduced. Take the first and last examples ChatGPT provided, for instance: virtual assistants and chatbots aren’t exactly new technology—go to nearly any customer support page, and you’ll see an option to use a chatbot for self-service.
However, ChatGPT can improve many of these functions with its natural language processing. Most of today’s chatbots are typically limited in the answers they can give, with pre-written answers for certain prompts that aren’t always accurate or relevant to the customer’s question.
AI like ChatGPT, on the other hand, can provide more accurate responses specific to each user’s question. Nevertheless, this is dependent on the AI being trained with that information; it can’t come up with new knowledge out of nowhere.
One key trait that makes ChatGPT stand out from older chatbots is its ability to retain the context of each question in a conversation. While many chatbots only respond to each question individually, ChatGPT “remembers” what was said earlier in the conversation, creating a more cohesive flow.
Indeed, Nuance’s latest GPT-powered conversational AI innovation showcases such innovation.
However, AI and ChatGPT can be only used to support customer self-service capabilities and answer basic questions. More complex issues are still best left to human agents. Still, as ChatGPT noted, letting an AI handle basic queries can help free up agents for more pressing or complicated issues.
Sentiment analysis is another growing functionality, using AI to gain more insight into how customers feel. Several contact center solutions now include AI-powered sentiment analysis capabilities that identify keywords, phrases, or even tone of voice to rate overall customer satisfaction. This provides a more holistic view of how customers feel than customer surveys.
Language translation is another developing area for AI technology. Microsoft has recently added live translation for captions to Microsoft Teams, which uses GPT-3.5 to translate different languages in real-time during calls. This can be helpful for customer service environments, as it reduces the language barrier for callers or agents who may not be entirely fluent in English.
Can You Trust ChatGPT With Your Customers?
As exciting as ChatGPT is, it’s still prone to error; it isn’t capable of independent thought and only draws from the information it’s trained on. (It also has a tendency to occasionally confidently provide answers that are completely wrong.) Given that, should companies really entrust their customer service to AI?
It all comes down to training. AI like ChatGPT are trained using deep learning and vast sets of text data. This is a lengthy process that has to frequently be tested to make sure the AI is learning correctly. Companies that want to use ChatGPT for their customer support need to make sure it’s trained correctly and provides accurate answers, especially when used for customer service.
The technology is still evolving, with new advancements on a nearly daily basis. But for the moment, AI is best left for helping with simple tasks and providing basic answers to users. ChatGPT can be helpful for streamlining work, gaining insights into customers, and even making decisions based on data, but anything more complex should still be left to humans. As amusing as AI tools are, any semblance of intelligence is still artificial.
