How to Use ChatGPT for Customer Service
Chatbots have been widely used by contact centers to reduce operational costs and provide 24/7 service to customers. However, natural language has always been a challenge for these bots, which is where ChatGPT comes in. OpenAI's free chatbot tool, ChatGPT, has been making waves since it was released in 2022. This tool uses generative AI technology and can understand complex language while engaging more like a human.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a chatbot tool that can respond to a wide range of questions and prompts with human-like replies. It uses OpenAI's GPT-3.5 LLM, which is a type of generative AI technology that's trained on billions of pages of internet text. Developers stopped the tool's training in September 2021, which means it can't answer questions about events that took place after that date.
Unlike other chatbots, ChatGPT can understand context, remember past conversations, and quickly generate creative content like poems, short stories, essays, articles, and email responses. But it's important to note that users should edit, personalize, and fact-check responses since the tool can have biases and inaccuracies found online.
How Can ChatGPT Help with Customer Service?
Customer service teams can use ChatGPT in two overarching ways:
- To improve customer-facing chatbots
- To streamline agents' workflows
Improving Customer-Facing Chatbots
ChatGPT can enhance customer-facing chatbots by providing more realistic and human-like dialogues. While organizations can't use ChatGPT itself as a customer-facing chatbot, they can use OpenAI's GPT-4 LLM API to train the model on their knowledge base. This way, the chatbot can answer questions specific to the business and offer human-like interactions.
Streamlining Agents' Workflows
ChatGPT can help agents more quickly pinpoint customer problems and understand their perspectives. For instance, agents can use it to summarize inquiries and past interactions with customers -- saving time while providing better customer support. ChatGPT can also be used to translate content into over 50 languages, but it's important to note that misspellings and colloquial language can confuse it and lead to mistranslations. Therefore, contact centers should still rely on multilingual staff to provide accurate translations.
Finally, customer service departments can use generative AI technologies like ChatGPT to power virtual assistants for their employees. This custom virtual assistant offers many of the same benefits as the free ChatGPT tool, such as email generation and summarization. Organizations can use APIs to embed their features directly into the tools agents work with every day.
Conclusion
ChatGPT's public release has sparked a lot of hype around generative AI. Microsoft and Salesforce have already announced partnerships with OpenAI, while others have built or plan to build their own generative AI tools. However, contact center managers should experiment with ChatGPT before investing in a paid generative AI tool. Generative AI is still new, so products may need many more years of fine-tuning before they become truly effective for customer service.
