OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most popular Artificial Intelligence (AI) application in cyberspace right now, wowing users with its ability to create seemingly human text, including articles, stories, computer code, and even poetry.
However, it’s more than a viral gimmick and experts predict it will have far-reaching consequences across many careers and industries – potentially changing the way we work forever.
And one of the careers will likely be customer service. If you work in customer service, you probably know that your work is already the focus of technology activity, chatbots, advanced analytics and automation.
Customer service work often involves talking to customers, understanding their problems and, where possible, finding answers. Turns out this is exactly the same as what ChatGPT does.
Does this mean that human customer service work is on a one-way road to redundancy?
Well, the answer is a little more complicated than yes or no, and luckily, in large part, it probably depends on how each person reacts to the technological changes that are taking place in their industry and many others.
So read on to find out what effect it’s likely to have and what steps you can take to prepare for a future where AI apps like ChatGPT are in everything we do.
First, what is ChatGPT?
In simple terms, it is a conversational interface that can understand natural language (i.e. human) input and respond to us. Ask a question or ask him to compose a text, such as an essay, poem, story or speech, and he will answer. Often, it will work so well that the average person won’t be able to tell that what it produces was written by a machine.
What makes it so great is that it is built on top of a large language model (LLM) called GPT-3. An LLM (Large Language Model) is a set of algorithms that have been trained on a large amount of text and therefore, in a probabilistic sense, understand the relationships between words. This means that because it has “read” so much text, it can predict with a high degree of accuracy what the best response should be to any input it receives.
As a very simple example, an LLM the size of GPT-3 will have found thousands of statements in its training data (which consisted of over 175 billion data points) saying that cats are furry, have four legs, are mammals and like to catch mice.
Therefore, if asked, “what is a cat?” he knows, with a high degree of probability, that answering “A cat is a furry, four-legged mammal that likes to catch mice” is probably accurate.
ChatGPT is an example of what is known as generative AI, as it is capable of producing completely new output (text) rather than simply regurgitating the data it is trained on. This field of AI technology is known as “Natural Language Processing” (NLP) or “Natural Language Generation” (NLG).
How will ChatGPT, LLMs and NLP be used in customer service?
Because of its conversational question-answering capabilities, customer service was one of the first areas where potential business use cases were identified for this technology.
However, it is important to remember that while ChatGPT is the most advanced LLM conversational interface publicly available, it is not yet publicly trainable on new data. This means that he is unlikely to have information relevant to a specific company and is unable to answer questions about your specific products and services. Yet!
With that in mind, here’s what LLM and natural language technology is capable of, and what we might be able to do with a future version of ChatGPT coming soon:
- Respond quickly and accurately to customer inquiries in a way that provides a much better customer experience than most existing chatbot technologies.
- Summarize customer feedback and let human agents and managers know what the most common questions and complaints are.
- Create automated customer responses to common questions and queries.
- Summarize internal performance metrics such as response times and customer satisfaction ratings.
- Provide guides and instructions to guide customers through any processes they may have to follow.
- Increase the skills of human customer service agents to deliver satisfactory results by summarizing key points and providing checklists of items that should be covered by their responses.
- Translate between languages to allow agents to communicate with customers around the world.
I work in customer service – how can I be sure I won’t be redundant?
ChatGPT is undoubtedly more impressive than the average customer service chatbot, and in the coming years it will undoubtedly get even better. If you work in customer service and your job involves simply reading a script or repeating phrases from an FAQ when asked questions, you might be breaking a sweat.
Fortunately, we all know that most customer service functions are a little more sophisticated than that. They often require a degree of emotional intelligence and empathy to fully understand how customers are affected by the issues they face.
Those who continue to be successful in the customer service field, as AI like ChatGPT and related technologies become more sophisticated, will likely learn to use it as a tool and work alongside AI.
By embracing the opportunities on offer, workers in the customer service space can learn to augment their innate human skills and desire to provide solutions with technology tools that allow them to do so faster, more effectively, and at greater scale.
Finally, it’s important to remember that the worst thing to do in the face of something so upsetting is to bury your head in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening. Natural language and conversational AI tools are going to transform many industries, so you’re far from alone.
To stay ahead, workers must stay current with new developments in the field and not be caught off guard as AI becomes more capable and efficient at more and more tasks.
Translated from the Original:
How Will ChatGPT Affect Your Job If You Work In Customer Service?
David Matos
Other References:
Free Course Fundamentals of Python Language for Data Analysis and Data Science (With ChatGPT)