ChatGPT Will Augment Contact Centre Agents – Not Replace Them
Neil Glover, Senior Director, Client Solutions at Quantanite discusses
I searched for information about ChatGPT on Google as I started writing this article and it returned over 70 million news stories. This is for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that was launched only a few months ago. ChatGPT has struck a chord because it is so simple to use and creates text that is genuinely understandable. It reached over 1 million registered users in the first five days after launch.
This is a long way from our traditional experience of AI as end consumers. There are millions of people talking to their phone using Siri or automating their home with Amazon’s Alexa, but the actual engagement is fairly simple. Asking Alexa to play the latest from Harry Styles on Spotify or asking Siri to plan a route to the supermarket as you are driving doesn’t feel very interactive.
In contrast you can ask ChatGPT a question about the history of London and it will give a credible and detailed reply. Ask it about the Apollo moon landings and it can name every scientist and astronaut. It’s in another league compared to what we have been used to and this includes most customer service chatbot interactions.
It has opened many opportunities and ideas for brands who for example may want to consider building customer relationships with a chatbot that is ChatGPT enabled and trained on documents that detail the complete history of the company.
We all know that customer service interactions today are much more than individual transactions. They are forming a bond between the brand and customer. Look at most social media interactions – they are not like customer service phone calls back when the customer service team only handled complaints.
If a brand like Virgin created a bot and named, it after their founder Sir Richard Branson then it could confidently talk about anything the company has ever publicly announced. It would be possible to ask the “Richard bot” how he first started Virgin records or about his experience building an airline and battling huge rivals like BA.
These are all customer interactions and in a traditional contact centre model would be impossible. You can’t call a customer service helpline and ask about the history of your favourite running shoe brand. If Nike had a chatbot named Phil, then you could.
Some commentators believe that if Chatbots are this good then we will not need human agents to interact with customers, but I don’t think this is true. The New York Post said that “AI is coming for your job.” These tabloid headlines are too simplistic.
Bots like ChatGPT are impressive and incredibly good at what they do, but they are essentially able to search and summarise a large amount of information very quickly – that’s not the only skill required when helping customers.
Where I think tools like ChatGPT could be transformative is in supporting the human agents that are interacting with customers. An important part of the job is listening, empathising with the customer, and finding the answers they need. This is where ChatGPT can really help by absorbing a large amount of product information and then helping to create the answers that customers need. The bot augments the actions of a human – it’s a tool.
Contact centres agents can already search FAQs and manuals now, but the difference is that if the relevant information is found in three different documents, then ChatGPT can summarise the information from all those documents into a single answer – and do all this in real-time.
Customer service automation is dramatically improving, but it will be inside the contact centre where we initially see improvement thanks to these new tools.
Neil Glover is Senior Director, Client Solutions at Quantanite.
Quantanite is a Customer Experience and Digital Outsourcing solutions provider for the world’s fastest growing companies.
The company delivers customer experience management services, back-office services, and digital content services, and provides sales enablement and demand generation services through its sister brand Growthonics.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in the United Kingdom, the company’s nearly 2,000 employees operate on four continents and offer companies a high-tech, personalised approach to delivering exceptional full-lifecycle customer engagement and supporting back office digital services faster, better, and at a more cost-effective engagement
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