How Can ChatGPT Help With Customer Service in 2024 (Tips, Implementation, and Real-Life Examples)
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There’s no doubt that AI chatbots make customer service more efficient. But one of their biggest drawbacks is that they lack contextual understanding.
Imagine talking to a bot that goes, “Sorry, I didn’t quite understand it.” on a loop.
But this changed in November 2022 when ChatGPT took the world by storm. ChatGPT stands out for its exceptional comprehension. Unlike typical chatbots that repeatedly apologize for misunderstanding, ChatGPT’s advanced capabilities ensure meaningful, empathetic interactions.
This makes using ChatGPT in customer service a very interesting proposition. But before we get into that, let’s first understand what ChatGPT is.
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What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a conversational AI tool developed by OpenAI. Tailored for human-like interactions, it’s especially beneficial for enhancing customer service experiences.
It currently has two versions:
- ChatGPT-3.5: This marked OpenAI’s foray into advanced conversational AI. Built on 45 terabytes of text data (including books, articles, and web pages). The version is free for unlimited use.
- ChatGPT-4: An advancement of 3.5, this model boasts more data, refined processing capabilities, and a greater token capacity. In simple terms, a token is akin to a word. With more tokens, ChatGPT-4 can engage in more comprehensive and detailed interactions. You need to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus to access this version.
Here’s how it works: Give ChatGPT a prompt on what you want to know or write about, and it provides a relevant response — as simple as that. Although ChatGPT has many use cases, for customer support teams, it can be especially useful.
How can ChatGPT help with customer service?
ChatGPT is fast, trainable, and can interact with a conversational tone — all of which make it a great asset to use in the customer service space.
Here are some use cases for ChatGPT in customer service to improve your customer experience and make it much more efficient:
1. Offer 24/7 customer support – without hiring more employees
Every customer would want 24/7 support so that they never have to wait to get their queries resolved. According to Hubspot Research, 90% of customers think an “immediate” response is very important when they have a query — this includes customers all over the world in different time zones.
And every business would offer it – if it weren’t for the heavy costs incurred by hiring more employees and training them.
But ChatGPT can truly help businesses do this without having to hire more people. How? By integrating ChatGPT into their customer service platform, businesses can offer real-time assistance regardless of the time zone or hour of the day.
While agents have shift limitations and can’t work around the clock, ChatGPT remains available without the need for rest. This consistent availability can be especially useful for businesses with a global customer base or those experiencing peak inquiry times outside regular business hours.
How can you do this?
Obtain access to the ChatGPT API. Incorporate it into your customer service platform’s backend, ensuring incoming chat requests are directed to ChatGPT. Configure response patterns based on frequently asked questions and typical customer issues to allow the AI to provide timely and relevant responses.
💡A lot of companies are already using ChatGPT to provide round-the-clock customer services. Here are some familiar brands and the types of queries they resolve via ChatGPT 24/7 to deliver exceptional customer service:
- Netflix uses ChatGPT to help customers with account issues, billing questions, and technical problems.
- Amazon answers questions about products, shipping, and returns via ChatGPT.
- Walmart leverages ChatGPT to help customers with order status, product availability, and shipping questions.
- Tesla uses ChatGPT to answer questions about their cars, features, and settings.
2. Provide customer support in multiple languages
We function in a global economy, where more and more businesses are open to customers all over the world. This means that customers from all linguistic backgrounds will reach out to them for support.
Hiring multi-lingual agents is one solution – but this again is a costly affair.
ChatGPT can fill this gap, translating customer queries and responding to them in their preferred language, ensuring no customer feels alienated due to language barriers. This also opens a new level of personalization — providing customers with responses in their own language and making them feel more comfortable.
How can you do this?
Integrate ChatGPT into your platform and enable the multi-language option. This will require some customization to prioritize the most common languages for your specific business and to ensure translations align with the nuances of your business’s terminology.
💡Some of your favorite brands are leveraging ChatGPT to provide great service to customers all over the world — in their own languages. Here are some real-life examples:
- Duolingo (staying true to its product) uses ChatGPT to provide customer support in over 30 languages. It can answer questions about Duolingo’s courses, features, and settings in any of the supported languages.
- Spotify provides customer support in over 60 languages with ChatGPT. It can answer questions about Spotify’s music, playlists, and features in any of the supported languages.
3. Provide better contextual comprehension for chatbots
Chatbots have become essential in the customer service space — they can help businesses quickly resolve common customer questions without the need for agents. But as we know, traditional chatbots are not the best at understanding context.
For instance, take a look at this exchange with a chatbot:
Clearly, even though the user mentioned that they made a mistake and meant to add 4 bananas to the cart, the chatbot simply held on to the keywords and made a call to add 4 apples, too.
With ChatGPT, you can improve your customer experience in this department by a mile.
Its deep learning algorithms allow it to understand the context better than traditional chatbots. Instead of just spotting keywords, it can grasp the essence of customer inquiries, ensuring more relevant and accurate responses.
This capability ensures that customers feel understood, reducing the back-and-forth that can frustrate them.
I did a quick roleplay with ChatGPT to see if it can understand the context better; here’s the same interaction with ChatGPT as above (spoiler: it went differently):
ChatGPT is much more understanding of context, which can drastically improve the way you interact with customers.
How can you do this?
When integrating ChatGPT, use past chat logs (while maintaining customer privacy) to help it learn the typical flow of conversations and common contexts that arise in your industry. This ‘training’ phase will help optimize its contextual understanding.
4. Handle a high influx of queries
Sometimes, you might experience a sudden surge in customer inquiries — it may be due to a marketing campaign, product launch, or some unexpected issue your product ran into. Whatever may be the reason, a sudden spike in customer queries can overwhelm your customer support team.
This is where ChatGPT comes to the rescue again. ChatGPT can help you tackle the situation cost-effectively – eliminating the need to rush hire and train more employees.
How can you do this?
Ensure that your hosting solution for ChatGPT can dynamically allocate resources based on traffic. Cloud-based infrastructures are optimal for this. Additionally, routinely review and update the knowledge base that ChatGPT accesses to ensure it can address queries on new products, services, or issues that may arise during such spikes.
5. Help you scale your customer service economically
Scaling your customer support team can be a costly and time-consuming process, especially for budding businesses or ones with a tight budget. But growing businesses simply do need more resources to handle customer queries — as more and more prospects and customers reach out to them.
Instead of continuously hiring more staff to handle increasing customer inquiries, businesses can deploy ChatGPT to handle a substantial portion of customer interactions.
While there’s an initial setup and training cost, maintaining and scaling the AI is generally more affordable than constantly hiring new employees.
How can you do this?
Integrate ChatGPT as a first line of defense in your customer service chain. Allow it to handle general inquiries, and if a query is too complex, it can escalate that to a human agent.
Monitor the system’s efficiency and make cost comparisons periodically to ensure the business is, in fact, saving money in the process.
6. Help you train your new hires
Training new support agents is not easy. While some of them may be freshers, others might have experience in the field but lack context in your industry or product. Either way, training your agents is an essential part of delivering great customer service.
Instead of overwhelming your new hires with documents on your product and support guidelines, you can use ChatGPT to help them be ‘floor-ready.’ Here are some ways in which you can leverage ChatGPT to train your agents:
- Hold interactive Q&A sessions: You can use ChatGPT to create interactive Q&A sessions to train your agents. The agents can ask questions about company policies, products, or services.
- Role-play with ChatGPT: Allow new agents to role-play as customers and use ChatGPT as the support agent. This provides them with a perspective from the customer’s side and helps them understand the kind of queries and responses they might encounter.
You can also switch this and have ChatGPT throw customer queries at new agents so that they can practice dealing with a range of situations before they go out and tackle real queries. - Show how to handle difficult situations: Handling an angry customer is not easy – even for the most experienced agents. To train your new hires to keep their calm and handle angry customers effectively, create scenarios where customers are frustrated or angry. Let the new agents interact with ChatGPT to see how it manages and de-escalates such situations.
- Regular Quizzes and Assessments: Utilize ChatGPT to conduct regular quizzes. The AI can create questions based on recent updates, ensuring agents always stay refreshed on their knowledge.
ChatGPT can help you do a range of things to help you train your employees better and simulate real-life scenarios to help them be better prepared. This will also save your experienced employees the time they will otherwise have to spend training your new hires.
As a bonus, your new hires will surely prefer this over reading pages and pages of information.
💡 Remember to provide feedback on ChatGPT’s responses. This helps in refining the AI’s answers and ensuring they align with the company’s evolving customer service standards.
How can you do this?
Use the OpenAI API to integrate ChatGPT with your company’s existing training software or Learning Management System (LMS). If starting from scratch, a cloud platform like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure can be used to host the LMS and integrate it with ChatGPT.
Feed ChatGPT with essential company information – values, mission, policies, culture, etc. This ensures the model can answer basic orientation questions accurately. Connect your company’s product database or CRM system with ChatGPT. Use API calls to pull specific data when queried.
Ensure all data interactions between ChatGPT and your systems are encrypted, especially if sensitive company information is involved.
To add a role-playing scenario to your setup, create a database of customer scenarios and integrate it with ChatGPT. Allow agents to pick scenarios and interact with the AI for simulated customer support experiences.
7. Use ChatGPT to respond to queries on online forums
Say an agent wants to respond to a negative review of your product on a product review website. Now, they need to be crisp and to the point with their response since prospective buyers will go through these reviews before they decide to pick your product. The tone of the response is also very important in these scenarios.
Your agent can simply reach out to ChatGPT to form a response with the right tone and within a specific character limit. Let’s see how ChatGPT performs in this situation:
ChatGPT comes up with a crisp response for this support agent — passing with flying colors.
Conclusion
Clearly, ChatGPT can help quite a lot when it comes to improving your customer service. Its ability to handle a wide array of queries is impressive, yet it’s essential to recognize its limitations.
Despite its impressive capabilities, ChatGPT cannot fully replace the nuances of human interaction, particularly in complex scenarios. But, it will surely be interesting to see how its accuracy, relevance, and context-sensitivity enhance in the years to come.
