Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that a little chatbot by the name of ChatGPT has taken the world by storm this year. In its first two months alone, ChatGPT reached 100 million active users. To put this in context, it took TikTok nearly 9 months to hit the same number, and Instagram nearly 2.5 years.
We know that ChatGPT is in the process of disrupting entire industries and modalities of work and study – but how will it affect customer service? Is it out to steal all of our jobs?
Keep reading to find out, or, if you’d rather watch a video, check out our on-demand webinar!
Generative AI – from science fiction to reality
AI had already begun to capture the popular imagination in the first half of the twentieth century. Popularized by movies and books—everything from the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz to the humanoid robot Maria, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—people were fascinated by its potential.
Research really kicked off in the 1950s, and there were a couple of seminal moments that really defined the field, all the way into the present day. In 1950, Alan Turing wrote a paper that introduced what is still the logical framework for AI today, the Turing Test.
The Turing Test is used to determine whether a machine has so-called intelligence or artificial intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” itself was coined six years later, in 1956, by John McCarthy at a conference that was dedicated to discussing this burgeoning field.
So we know that there was already a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence, as early as the fifties. The challenge was that computing power at this point was incredibly expensive and simply not advanced enough to bring any of this past the theoretical. So, even though we already had the basic principles of AI down, it wasn’t really possible to make some of the major advances that we’re familiar with today.
This changed over the following decades, with advancements on both the computing and theoretical side. This means that the first chatbots came to us as early as 1966. But not to get too into the weeds, let’s jump ahead to the phenomenon that is ChatGPT.
ChatGPT: AI for the people
The reason your CEO is knocking on your door asking about ChatGPT, the reason your friends are talking about it at dinner parties, is because everyone is using it, and the reason everyone is using it is because ChatGPT makes AI available to everyone.
It’s a conversational interface for AI, so you can engage with these super complicated models without knowing a lick of code, without knowing any math, without having to be a mathematician or data scientist. It has democratized AI and brought it to the masses.
In our recent webinar covering the rise of ChatGPT in customer service—one of our best-attended ever—we took a poll where 70% of participants answered “yes” when asked if they had used ChatGPT to help them in their jobs. So, we know it’s here to stay. But how can we best use it to our advantage?
What is ChatGPT for customer service good for, anyway?
1. ChatGPT can help you learn from customer interactions
ChatGPT can analyze customer interactions and provide insights into customer behavior and preferences. By understanding your customers better, you can tailor your responses to their needs and improve their overall experience. This will help you build stronger relationships with your customers and increase customer loyalty.
It’s important to introduce ChatGPT into your organization in a strategic way – in order to analyze customer data, for example, you must have clean data and have processes in place to action any insights that come out of it.
2. ChatGPT can help you handle repetitive inquiries and tasks
One of the biggest challenges of customer service is handling repetitive inquiries that tend to use up your agents’ valuable time.
With ChatGPT, you can automate the process of answering repetitive inquiries, freeing up your time to focus on more complex issues. This will not only improve your efficiency but also reduce your workload.
Even something as simple as getting up to speed with a customer by scrolling through past messages can take a lot of time. At Dixa, we’ve introduced Smart Conversation Summaries so that agents can quickly find the conversation that they’re looking for, get up to speed, and respond to the customer quickly and accurately.
3. ChatGPT can help boost your customer service team’s productivity
ChatGPT can help you handle more, without compromising on quality, making your agents more efficient. This will help you improve your productivity and reduce your response time, which will ultimately lead to improved customer satisfaction.
At Dixa, we’ve introduced Smart Conversation Replies, a new feature which leverages ChatGPT to draft responses to customer queries, saving you and your agents time, and helping you deliver personalized service at scale.
The AI drafts a response based on existing (public) knowledge base content, which can then be checked and edited, if necessary, by the agent, before sending.
4. ChatGPT can help you stay ahead of the curve
The world of customer service is constantly evolving, and ChatGPT is just one example of emerging technology that can have a positive effect on the industry.
By working with ChatGPT, you can stay ahead of the curve and develop new skills that will be valuable in the future. By embracing emerging technology, you can stay ahead of the curve and advance your career.
5. Spoiler alert: ChatGPT is not here to replace you, but to assist you
ChatGPT is by no means a silver bullet. It’s not designed to replace human customer service reps. Instead, it’s here to assist in handling customer inquiries more efficiently.
By working with ChatGPT, you can improve your response time and accuracy, which will ultimately lead to better customer satisfaction.
ChatGPT for customer service: Use with care
ChatGPT is a Swiss army knife of sorts – useless if you don’t know how to use it, but powerful and versatile if you know how to operate it.
It can make you more productive, helping you do things that you couldn’t before, at least at a certain speed or quality level, but it’s important to implement it with care.
Introducing ChatGPT in a thoughtful and strategic manner will actually help improve the agent experience, removing tasks that they see as time-consuming and frustrating and helping them focus on the customer at hand.
Is ChatGPT coming for your customer service job?
In our ChatGPT webinar, when asked if they were worried about AI, only 8% of attendees answered yes, with 42% answering “somewhat,” and 50% answering “not worried at all.” We think this is a good split.
ChatGPT is absolutely a disruptor – it’s natural to be a little worried and proceed with caution, but it can also be a game-changer when it comes to helping your customer service team increase their efficiency.
And, just to be safe, we asked ChatGPT:
