The world has been buzzing with the impact of AI on work scenarios since the ChatGPT launch in November 2022. While AI is not new, ChatGPT marks a significant leap in automation technology owing to its ability to humanize conversations and answer ‘almost’ any question with unprecedented accuracy for a chatbot.
This feature also encouraged the internet to lambast such Conversational AI tools in the context of job endangerment, data manipulation, circulating biased views, and reducing human creativity.
But these views tilt too much on the pessimistic side. Technological innovations should always be analyzed with a fair consideration of their benefits and potential challenges.
This is what this blog aims to do while expanding on the contact center industry.
But First, What is ChatGPT?
- A brainchild of Open AI, it is a language processing tool driven by AI
- Has a remarkable ability to interact in a conversational dialogue form
- Can answer questions and assist with various tasks, such as composing emails, writing essays, and coding, with a remarkable level of accuracy
- Not just restricted to simple questions; it can even tackle complex questions conversationally.
- It has the ability to offer human-like responses and can change the way information is consumed.
ChatGPT in Contact Centers: An Enabler or Disrupter?
The contact center industry is already familiar with AI technology, and businesses have even invested massive amounts of greenback in leveraging its potential.
Going by a Gartner estimate, the contact center industry could save up to $80 bn by replacing humans with chatbots, and estimated that roughly ten percent of agent interactions will be performed through conversational AI by 2026.
What more can ChatGPT bring to the table?
Going by its NLP-based response mechanism, it has a vast potential to transform the contact center industry on two fronts – Efficient Customer support services and Better customer experience(CX)
1. Efficient Customer Experience (CX)
Imagine you call up customer service to know about delayed order delivery. You are routed to IVR, where a bot asks you to choose an option from the pre-defined menu. While many of you may be expecting to get in touch with a live agent post-picking an option, to your surprise, the bot does it all!
It tells you that the delivery agent got the wrong pin code- the reason why your order is late.
This is a peek into the capabilities of ChatGPT, which goes a level beyond the traditional chatbots. Nobody is saying that there won’t be a live agent on the other end in the next few years, it’s just that they won’t be burdened with queries that a machine can be optimized to learn.
ChatGPT can improve CX and make personalized customer service an absolute norm in the contact center industry, provided it’s used for the right reasons.
⦿ Consistent Responses
ChatGPT integrated into your contact center AI capabilities can help deliver consistent responses. Its ML-based algorithm can decode customer intent and deliver accurate, contextual responses.
⦿ Scalability
Integrating ChatGPT into your contact center can enable it to handle approximately any given volume of calls in real time. This can reduce the wait times for customers and ensure that they do not return without answers or, worse, be disappointed.
⦿ Actionable Insights
ChatGPT generates a wealth of data on customer interaction and queries. This data can be leveraged to derive insights into customer expectations which can come in handy for customer experience and support processes.
2. Competitive Customer Service
ChatGPT has immense potential to transform customer service delivery. Its Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities can provide customers with efficient and accurate responses by understanding the intent behind their queries in real-time. Further, it can potentially cut down operational costs by bringing down the need for human agents.
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Facilitator for Existing Tools
ChatGPT has the potential to enhance the functioning of many contact center technologies. Integrating ChatGPT with these tools can contribute towards lower wait times, better responsiveness, more personalized support, and generate better insights for improvement in customer experience.
Self-service Tools
Self-service portals are known to be convenient as they help customers get what they want more quickly vis-a-vis talking to a live agent. Integration with ChatGPT can further enhance their efficiency. Let’s see how
‣ IVR (interactive voice response)
By integrating NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning algorithms into the IVR system, ChatGPT can help improve IVR efficiency. It can enable the system to better understand customer intent and context and route calls accordingly, which ultimately paves the way for personalized responses.
‣ Chatbots
ChatGPT can enable customer service bots to understand and respond to customer queries proactively. By delivering human-like conversations, they can reduce the need for human-agent interventions enabling faster call resolutions. Further, the ability of ChatGPT to learn from customer interactions can allow it to improve its performance over time.
‣ Knowledge Base
ChatGPT can help automate the updation of the knowledge base management system keeping it up-to-date and relevant, enabling agents to find answers quicker. It can remove customers’ reliance on rigid keywords and enable conversational searches. Further, equipping agents with contextual information in real-time can boost the quality of customer interactions.
‣ CRM Systems
The integration of ChatGPT and CRM systems can help automate repetitive queries and assist customers with more accurate information. It can pick up customer data stored in the CRM to personalize and humanize interactions. Also, it can improve the accuracy of customer data classification and categorization for customized responses.
‣ Omnichannel Integration
ChatGPT can ensure consistent CX delivery across channels such as email, social media, text, Web chat, etc. Its ability to understand and generate human-like texts can improve the ease of communication and personalize responses. Its ability to deal with multiple interactions at once can help it handle high call volumes during peak hours.
| Also See: 10 Tips to Improve the Productivity of Your Call Center Agents |
Challenges
ChatGPT can facilitate contact center operations but cannot completely replace human agents because:
- While it can easily handle level-1 queries, dealing with complex questions still requires human assistance.
- Being a language model trained on a vast amount of data, it can struggle with the specific language and ‘shifting context’ in industries.
- ChatGPT may not be consistent with its responses, especially since its answers derive from a large and diverse dataset.
- Its knowledge is largely limited to the data it’s been trained on, which means it would not be aware of the latest happenings in the industry if not retrained.
- And not to forget the ethical and privacy concerns associated with sharing customer data.
Wrap up
By leveraging the potential of ChatGPT in contact centers, businesses can reduce costs spent on enhancing service delivery. With ChatGPT, they can enhance self-service capabilities, facilitate chatbots, improve knowledge management, and integrate with CRM systems. Owing to its immense ability to understand and respond to natural language, ChatGPT can provide quick and accurate answers to customer queries, reducing wait times and improving the overall CX.
However, there are challenges that need to be addressed, such as ensuring data privacy, accuracy, and security. Nevertheless, proper implementation and monitoring can ensure an efficient and satisfying customer service experience.
