Last Updated: September 2024
Using ChatGPT for customer service presents a powerful tool to enhance the delivery of better customer experiences. With its natural language understanding and generation capabilities, ChatGPT can help you provide a personalized and seamless customer service experience.
However, before we dive into this, it is essential to acknowledge that ChatGPT can produce incorrect or nonsensical responses. Therefore, relying solely on ChatGPT without human intervention is not yet advisable for consistently good service.
Integrating ChatGPT into customer service enables efficient handling of routine inquiries, freeing human agents to focus on complex issues requiring empathy and critical thinking. Striking the right balance between automation and human input is key.
Let’s explore how using ChatGPT for customer service can effectively elevate your team’s capability to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced language model specifically designed for conversational interactions. It utilizes GPT-3.5 for the free version and GPT-4 for the paid ChatGPT Plus version.
Human AI trainers fine-tuned ChatGPT by playing both the user and an AI assistant, submitting conversational data. This generative AI capability allows ChatGPT to provide natural-sounding answers and engage in follow-up conversations with users, offering rephrasings, clarifications, summaries, and additional details.
When functioning optimally, ChatGPT can save time, enhance knowledge, and spark new ideas. However, it’s essential to remember that despite the impressive results, ChatGPT is not a sentient computer but a sophisticated language model.
Limitations of ChatGPT
ChatGPT may be an advanced language model, but it is not a reliable knowledge base or encyclopedia. As informed by the makers of ChatGPT, it can provide incorrect information and cannot distinguish between facts and fabrications.
It responds with confidence, even when its answers are completely inaccurate, and it lacks the ability to distinguish between genuine facts and fabricated information. Stack Overflow even temporarily banned the use of ChatGPT-generated answers due to these limitations.
To illustrate, imagine you’re seeking advice on a complex technical issue from ChatGPT. Despite its self-assured responses, it may provide incorrect solutions due to its limitations in comprehending the intricacies of the problem.
Relying solely on ChatGPT’s answers could potentially lead to misguided actions and frustrating outcomes. Hence, it is essential to exercise caution and supplement the AI’s responses with human expertise when addressing critical matters.
How ChatGPT and AI can improve your customer service
Having understood that ChatGPT is not entirely dependable, it still has potential for automating certain aspects of customer service. Let’s explore its applications:
1) Using AI generated answers for human review
AI can sometimes give the right answers, or at least close to what is needed, which can save time for customer service. However, making AI work well for your specific needs takes some effort.
Right now, ChatGPT can’t be customized for your content, but other AI tools can be. Before letting a third party access customer and internal data, you need to think about privacy and security.
It’s also crucial to have team members who can tell if the AI answers are correct or not. For now, AI tools like the predictive text in Gmail can be useful for customer service without needing a lot of customization.
2) Accelerate Onboarding for New Team Members
Starting on a customer service team can be challenging due to the vast amount of information to learn. However, an AI tool can make this process easier by suggesting relevant internal documents and next steps, reducing the need for extensive searching and easing the burden on existing team members.
A study conducted on over 5,000 customer service agents in April 2023 introduced a generative AI similar to ChatGPT. The study revealed that having AI assistance increased productivity by an average of 14%, with the most significant impact on new and less experienced workers, while experienced workers were less affected.
The AI acted as a supportive work buddy, providing guidance and likely answers in various situations. Unlike time-limited onboarding and training by human experts, AI’s assistance is scalable and can extend and enhance the training period for new team members.
3) Long discussions can be summarized
Language models, especially large ones, excel at summarizing written content. In complex support discussions, an automatic summary generated by the model can save time for your team members. It can help them grasp the context quickly and keeps the conversation on track toward finding a solution.
4) Categorize and priortize
If your customer service teams spend a lot of time organizing questions and trying to understand where problems are happening, AI tools can help. These tools can learn from past data and suggest better ways to sort and group the questions.
They can review all the conversations, which is time-consuming for humans because there are so many. This way, AI can find patterns and group questions together more efficiently, making customer service work faster and better.
5) Monitoring quality
As customer service demands grow, maintaining quality and consistency becomes harder. AI tools are excellent at sentiment analysis and can help you identify conversations that need review.
They can even suggest potential problems or opportunities based on other responses. This way, AI can assist you in maintaining high-quality customer service by pinpointing areas that require attention and improvement.
6) Offer help proactively
Being able to provide help before customers even ask is even more valuable than a fast response time. With AI, you can detect when a customer is stuck or about to face an issue and offer the most relevant help article. This proactive approach can significantly enhance customer experiences, especially at a larger scale where manual efforts would be challenging.
The Future of AI in Customer Service
The future of AI in customer service is continually evolving, and its widespread use is inevitable. While ChatGPT might not be ready for direct customer support, the AI-augmenting-humans approach is here to stay.
Consider the following when using AI in customer service:
- Understand the value your support brings to customers: While ChatGPT can generate responses, human agents know the importance of asking follow-up questions or seeking specific details to address customer needs effectively.
- Natural conversations with AI can hide mistakes: As AI becomes more human-like, errors may go unnoticed until later stages. Initially, AI may be better suited for suggesting solutions for human review and measuring support quality.
- Trust is crucial: When things go wrong, customers want accountability and assistance from a person who cares about their experience. Deciding where to apply human interaction alongside AI, which handles repetitive tasks, is essential for building trust with customers.
Recommended: How to use ChatGPT for Shopify
Benefits of Automated Customer Service
Unlike traditional customer support methods that rely on human agents to manually respond to each query, automated software can instantly process incoming messages and provide immediate replies.
Here’s how it works:
- Instant response: Automated software can analyze customer messages and identify frequently asked questions or common issues. It can then use pre-defined responses or AI-generated answers to provide instant replies.
- 24/7 availability: Automated systems operate round-the-clock, ensuring that customers receive timely responses at any hour of the day, even during weekends and holidays.
- Scalability: As the number of customer inquiries grows, an automated system can efficiently handle a large volume of requests simultaneously.
- Quick access to information: Automated systems can access vast knowledge bases and databases instantly and can retrieve relevant information to provide accurate answers faster than a human agent.
- Real-time updates: Automated systems can send automated notifications and updates to customers regarding their queries, keeping them informed about the progress of their requests without delay.
Although there are benefits to implementing ChatGPT and AI tools, it’s crucial to acknowledge their limitations.
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Final Thoughts
Using ChatGPT for customer service presents opportunities and challenges. While it can enhance response times and automate tasks, careful consideration of its limitations and the need for human intervention is essential for accuracy and empathy. The right balance between AI and human involvement is crucial.
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