The public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 garnered a worldwide wave of interest in the capabilities of generative AI. It took only five days for this tool to acquire the first million
users on its platform. As on June 2023, it had a staggering 1,700 million monthly views on its website. In the interim, tech giants such as Microsoft partnered with OpenAI, while
others like Google announced the launch of their own generative AI tools.
Contact centers have relied on chatbot to enhance customer service and reduce operational costs since the past several years. A recent Economic Times survey made an interesting
revelation: it reported that about 27% of customers were unsure whether their last service interaction was with a bot or a human, and 40% didn’t care which one answered their query
as long as it was resolved.
With this openness in customer attitude and the continuing commitment to enhance their experience, it is little surprise that ChatGPT is “the next big thing” in the contact center
space.
OpenAI’s developers used billions of pages of text from the Internet to train the tool. It has the ability to analyze enormous sets of data, provide insights, and make recommendations.
But it is also limited by what it was “fed”, which is the biases and inaccuracies commonly found on the Internet.
Having said that, the tool is widely used by individuals for entertainment, like getting responses to quirky questions, or writing short poems. It is also commonly used by professionals
to automate a range of tasks, like writing code or ad copy. Businesses use it to gain insights into the market and generate personalized content for their customers.
What is ChatGPT?
A survey report published by Forrester mentioned that 64% respondents planned to increase their investments in the next 12 months to support AI in the contact center.
What makes ChatGPT special for contact centers is that, unlike traditional chatbot, it can understand complex language and offer more human-like engagement. It can grasp the
customer’s questions in context, remember chat history, and generate satisfactory responses almost instantly.
Contact centers can use ChatGPT to improve customer service in at least eight ways.
- Answer FAQs
Traditional chatbots are programmed based on a specific set of rules and can respond to a fixed set of keywords. This programming comes with an inherent limitation—traditional
chatbots are often unable to decipher human language.
Enter ChatGPT. This tool can be trained on the knowledge base and FAQs list of your business. When customers ask a question, it can comprehend their context, analyze the
question, respond, and even direct them to additional resources. It can also incorporate the customer’s name, past interactions and preferences, thereby creating a more
personalized customer experience. The best part is that this response is in human-like language.
While ChatGPT cannot directly be used as a customer-facing chatbot, you may use the API for OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM to train the model on your business’ knowledge base and
incorporate it into your customer-facing chatbot.
- Understand the Customer’s Issue
Perhaps the most important and sensitive role of customer service agents is to comprehend the customer’s frustration. They do this by reading and understanding the current
complaint and past interactions with the customer. This can be quite a time-consuming task.
ChatGPT is trained on a massive dataset of text and code, which includes a large number of customer service interactions. This allows ChatGPT to understand the common patterns
and terminology used in customer service interactions, and help agents summarize these interactions. Agents can copy the complaints and paste them into ChatGPT, and prompt
the tool to generate a summary. The summarized content can help them pinpoint the exact problem area to be resolved.
- Create a Relevant Response
The key role played by contact centers is responding to unhappy customers. ChatGPT can help create precise e-mail replies based on the prompts provided. It can also generate
short-form responses to negative reviews on social media. Again, all of this is done using an empathetic, professional, human-like tone.
An important point to remember is that ChatGPT does not know your business policies. So, it is essential to check the responses generated to ensure that it does not promise a
resolution—like compensation or a discount—that you cannot deliver.
- Draft Empathetic E-mail Templates
Based on the prompts provided, ChatGPT can create a custom e-mail template.
In case of a complaint, it will express empathy for the customer’s problem, apologies, and offer a solution. For example, if the customer is facing difficulty in contacting the center,
ChatGPT will generate a response that acknowledges the issue, apologizes for the inconvenience caused, provides reassurance that measures are being taken to offer better
service, and recommends the customer to send more details about the issue and contact information for a callback.
The agent can use this helpful template while responding to the customer’s e-mail.
