We all know about ChatGPT now and how it’s taken over the world by storm.
It’s got AI enthusiasts talking, podcasting, YouTubing, and tweeting about the vast societal benefits the new technology will unleash—and it has AI pessimists wondering about our place in an AI-powered and possibly AI-led world.
But one thing’s for sure, LLMs like GPT are here to stay and are transforming how we work, connect, and interact with technology and each other. And, given its speed of adoption, it’s well on its way to doing that faster than any technological shift we’ve experienced so far.
With the widespread benefits that GPT offers at an affordable price—and with costs estimated to further drop as systems become even more efficient and optimized—businesses are clamoring to adopt this new technology to stay ahead and stay relevant.
And one of the key areas where businesses can experience massive gains quickly is customer service automation.
The next big leap in customer service
Businesses spend over $1.3 trillion per year to address customer requests. The need to optimize this cost was the driving force behind the rapid rise of the customer service chatbot industry.
But chatbots have been around for nearly five decades. The very first chatbot came out way back in 1966. Named ELIZA, it was built by Joseph Weizenbaum, a German computer scientist and Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ELIZA was intended to mimic a therapist who would ask open-ended questions, and then respond with follow-up queries. An idea that was way ahead of its time.
We’ve come a long way since ELIZA now, with chatbots for every industry and use case. But the chatbot experience to date has been far from satisfactory.
Robotic responses and inflexible conversational capabilities led to more customer frustration than satisfaction. In fact, over 72% of respondents in a recent survey reported that interaction with a chatbot is a “complete waste of time.”
Companies that sought to cut costs by replacing live operators with automated customer service found themselves facing unhappy customers and lost loyalty. It was clear that the quality of customer service plummets when humans are removed from the equation and customers are forced to deal with technology that just isn’t up to the task.
But generative AI changes all this.
How ChatGPT is reshaping customer service automation
With its human-like conversational capabilities, GPT, Bard, Claude, and other popular LLMs open up whole new possibilities for automating and delivering exceptional customer service.
While ChatGPT is trained only on public internet data until September 2021, their conversational capabilities can be fine-tuned to suit any business. Tools like Superseek make it easy for businesses to adopt LLMs and create their own ChatGPT, powered and limited by their own content.
Let’s take a look at how this transforms customer service automation as we know it.
Human-like answers on autopilot
Unlike traditional chatbots, ChatGPT-powered customer service bots make customer interactions more human, with their ability to understand context, provide easy-to-understand conversational answers, ask clarifying questions, and constantly improve with feedback.
Faster resolutions
69% of consumers prefer a chatbot because it provides instant answers to their questions. No wonder, given that the average queue waiting time in 2022 was 5 minutes and 16 seconds.
Traditional customer service chatbots are limited by their rule-based programming, which means they can only handle a specific set of questions. Any question outside its rules requires human involvement—which makes for longer waiting times for customers. ChatGPT-powered customer service chatbots, on the other hand, can understand the context of a question and provide an answer—as long as the answer is available in some form and shape in the website or help center.
Minimal overheads
Traditional customer service chatbots are difficult to set up. The build process focuses more on configuration and debugging than it does content; moreover, non-developers find the whole thing too complicated. It takes far too long to set up a bot to handle even simple questions—let alone have meaningful conversations. Add to this, any flow changes often means adjusting other parts of the system to ensure that nothing breaks—and that gets very complicated very fast.
GPT-powered customer service bots like Superseek require minimal rule configurations, if any, and become operational immediately. Plus, any content changes are reflected in the bot’s response instantly without requiring the business to take any action.
Multilingual from day one
For businesses with global customers, setting up a multilingual bot used to be a costly endeavor. But GPT is multilingual out of the box and is ready to tackle customer questions in any language. If the business’s help center or website is in English, and the chatbot is faced with a question in say, Spanish, the chatbot will respond in Spanish.
Wait, is this the end of human support?
Well, no.
While ChatGPT-powered customer service chatbots can handle a far broader range of customer questions than traditional chatbots, the long tail of customer questions will still need humans to provide personalized support.
In order to provide top-notch customer service, businesses will need to adopt a hybrid approach to customer service, using the ChatGPT -powered chatbots as front-line support and passing more complex questions that require human intervention to support staff.
Also, a business’s GPT-powered chatbot is only as accurate as its source content. Unless the business takes steps to regularly update the source content of its GPT-powered chatbot, it will soon find that customers receive outdated—and possibly even wrong—answers when they ask questions. This step is critical and requires customer service professionals to always ensure that help content is accurate and up-to-date.
About Superseek
Superseek makes it easy for any business to harness the power of AI and large language models like ChatGPT to enhance customer service and visitor engagement.
Superseek is a GPT-powered conversational assistant that’s trained on all of a business’ customer-facing content – including website content, help articles, and any uploaded documents – and provides customers and visitors with instant, up-to-date, and human-like answers to all their questions. Superseek also provides businesses with rich and actionable insights to create, improve, and uplevel all their website and help content.