Unless one has been living under a rock the big buzzword of customer experience, seen everywhere and anywhere, is now ChatGPT.
The AI-based technology is being viewed as the biggest innovation in decades, relegating the text chatbot a dinosaur of "old tech" in comparison.
The hype, which is valid, is being driven by the need to be more efficient, provide consumers and customers with what they need as fast as possible, and, in the retail realm, the quest to personalize, personalize, personalize the customer experience.
In response technology providers are busy striving to make all that happen. One is OvationCXM which has incorporated ChatGPT to drive deeper personalization into the customer experience.
It has integrated Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, the foundation of ChatGPT, into its CXM platform.
The integration generates human-like responses and smart solutions in real time, and will work in tandem with OvationCXM's existing artificial intelligence suite to elevate clear communication, smart help and predictive support for its customers.
In expanding its conversational AI capabilities it's able to deliver real-time AI assistance that is transforming how retailers and businesses can equip teams to better interact with customers. It's using several AI models to offer smart, cross-organizational help and intelligent conversation.
To learn more, RetailCustomerExperience reached out via an email interview to Alan Finlay, head of product at OvationCXM, on ChatGPT's role in retail CX.
Q. There's been a lot of conversation in the past few months regarding ChatGPT. From your experience, and in your viewpoint, is ChatGPT a technology that can play into the customer experience and if so, why, and if not, why?
A. There's no denying that AI communication platforms like ChatGPT are the future of interactive technology. Large-scale adoption of this technology will help revolutionize text generation throughout every market and will be an incredible step forward for the customer experience sector. Customers expect only the best out of their digital services and they expect the best help quickly. Sure, sometimes the AI responses can be inaccurate and generalized, but the speed with which responses are delivered and the easy conversational tone are something to behold. The key is going to be fine tuning the large models to give them guidance, guardrails and focus them specifically on the questions and issues that an organization's customers have. With this oversight, AI will reduce the amount of time it will take for customers to get the answers they need with increased contextual power for real-time support.
AI is a must-have in customer experience, but its future will depend on its integrations that surpass its current use. Weaving ChatGPT into both external and internal-facing processes will inevitably streamline and enhance all levels of digital servicing. The focus should first be on empowering your internal teams with AI to be more efficient and impactful and then deploy it to customer-facing situations to drive increased self-service once confidence in the quality of responses improves.
Q. More than a few studies have revealed customers aren't completely thrilled with today's chatbot customer service — lots of frustration. Do you see ChatGPT playing a role in improving the current chatbots in use?
A. According to a HubSpot study, 40% of web users do not care if they are served by a bot or human, as long as they get the answers they need. Externally, upgraded conversational AI will vastly improve the customer experience by reducing clunky verbiage and helping address the customer's needs faster and with enhanced precision. Customers already prefer to self-serve; if they can self-serve with a bot that provides a human-like interaction and solves problems in one session, it should level up customer experience dramatically.
What separates a product like ChatGPT from a typical chatbot is its ability to really understand the context of a conversation if appropriately prompted, detect tone and mimic a more human conversational experience. No one likes to feel like they're interacting with a pre-determined set of auto-responses.
There may be some hesitation for organizations to fully adopt a customer-facing chatbot that can generate any text it wants (a little bit scary, right?), but while we fine tune models and add additional guardrails, I believe there will be integrated use cases for ChatGPT as part of larger conversational AI platforms. For example, only leveraging ChatGPT models when the customer asks the chatbot something that isn't part of its current knowledge base (i.e. a "fallback response"). ChatGPT could then use its conversational skills to understand the need, summarize it and either direct it to an internal user or seamlessly recommend an answer from the existing pool of knowledge that it has.
Q. The hype around ChatGPT has heavily focused on the intelligence aspect as well as the potential negative aspects. In relation to retail customer experience do you see the intelligence capability providing possibly the best-ever "chat" customer service?
A. Yes, but only if the proper controls are in place. I believe the best experiences will come when teams incorporate ChatGPT with additional AI engines they already have. Internally, customer experience platforms that incorporate ChatGPT into their existing conversational AI capabilities can provide better knowledge delivery and insights on customer journeys, summarize customer experience for support professionals, and detect sentiment and intent during interactions to re-route help claims to the appropriate department and team. Internal users will be able to respond to customers faster and with more confidence from personalized knowledge suggestions. Organizations can even leverage real time insights to build and test new chatbots on the fly.
Q. With regard to the negative aspects at this point, is the fear of alienating a customer with a potential insulting/annoying ChatGPT interaction a viable concern in the retail environment?
A. As companies progress through this new and innovative learning period, we will begin seeing an expansion of its capacity and all-important testing of the technology's guardrails. There will inevitably be rough patches as companies stress-test this new communication tool, but as this technology advances, it should be quick to learn and retrain if you have the right tools in place. Businesses would do well to think through pre-vetted answers and flows to serve up appropriate responses to the most common inquiries. Companies like OpenAI are also making rapid progress on preventing poor responses which will help alleviate this concern as well.
Q. If you could predict where ChatGPT will "land" within the retail customer experience what's your prediction?
A. New advances in AI will soon shape every aspect of a customer's experience as soon as they begin interacting with the Internet. From the moment they open their search engine and click through their desired website, everything they interact with will at least on some level be improved with the help of AI. From the external website layout optimization to the chat support bar in the corner of the page, AI will soon touch every aspect of the customer journey. Conversational will not replace IT, sales and customer support departments, but will instead enhance them as the latest tool in their digital tool belt.
I believe that in the non-so-distant future, having a conversational UX will become table stakes for all software. For many applications, it will become the de facto way customers interact with the product or company.