ChatGPT is great, but what about Customer Service?

Hello, and welcome to VIP: Value in People, my biweekly newsletter. Here I’ll engage with you on what matters most to the customer service experience. Thank you so much for being here. If you want to know more about me or VIPdesk Connect, click here!?

Do you go a single day without talking or reading about ChatGPT and generative AI??

We are in the same boat! At VIPdesk Connect, we talk about ChatGPT and use it daily—for outline agendas, templates for refining policies and procedures, marketing language, proper grammar, implementation plan tasks, timelines, refinement of reports, analysis, and more.?

However, the analysis part went haywire. We fed our annual team survey feedback into ChatGPT, and it returned some crazy results that were… not exactly true. You can learn more about AI’s hallucinations in this fascinating newsletter by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.?

I see this as one of the exciting aspects of the AI revolution—we are all learning what it can and can’t do.

For us and for our industry (customer service), the looming impact is huge. We’ve all contacted customer service via phone, email, chat, or text. We’ve probably even experienced a decent chatbot. Some of our experiences have been good and some have been poor. Most of that had to do with who implemented the technology. Was it logical? Has it kept up with the changes that businesses face??

Even when we speak with real humans, we all know we can have a great experience or a poor one. Most of that has nothing to do with the customer service professional on the other end of the phone. Most of it is about logistics and planning, or policy and procedures. Regardless, whether your experience is automated or not… it is about to change.?

As Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson, and Karthik Narain cover in their Harvard Business Review article, “Generative AI Will Enhance — Not Erase — Customer Service Jobs,” we aren’t going to see AI totally take over these positions, at least not in the organizations that choose to implement AI in the most effective way. We’re going to be collaborating with AI to enhance our jobs. As Daugherty, Wilson, and Narain say, “We’re at the start of an incredibly exciting era that will fundamentally transform the way information is accessed, content is created, customer needs are served, and businesses are run.”

If you haven’t already started to notice these changes, here are some that you’re going to start seeing very soon:

Agent assist—Chatbots behind the scenes support the customer service professionals so that you get a faster, more consistent answer.

Digital chatbots—Routine answers online from chatbots that use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language understanding (NLU) to directly communicate with you via chat, of course, but also via email and text.

Voice bots—Responses that mimic human speech when you call customer service.?

It’s all super exciting! It’s also overwhelming.?

This is just the beginning! I would love to hear what other industries are doing as it relates to leveraging machine learning and generative AI.?

Maureen Burns, Sharona Sankar-King, Priscilla Dell’Orto, and Eduardo Roma put it best in their Harvard Business Review article, “Using AI to Build Stronger Connections with Customers”:

“While generative AI has the potential to bend the cost curve in many industries, the greatest value will come to those companies that focus on enriching the lives of their customers.”

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