In this digital age, a customer’s bad experience with a brand can easily go viral on the Internet with a single social media post. We’ve heard countless stories of such unpleasant experiences — perhaps with an airline or telecom services provider — and it can tarnish a brand’s reputation when many people can relate to these stories.
A common denominator in bad experiences is communication or the lack thereof. That is why, at a very basic level, businesses must make themselves accessible to customers through various communication channels. Ultimately, delivering great customer experiences and having a strong customer communication strategy have never been more important.
Contact centres — which offer customers and companies a direct line of communication — are an important customer touchpoint. It’s where the company’s reputation is often won or lost. When customers approach the customer service agent, they want help and answers, and they want them fast. To quickly address the large volume of requests, businesses need an always-on approach to customer engagement and service, which is why chatbots have become a popular solution.
How chatbots succeed and where they fail
Empowered with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, chatbots are very effective for answering simple questions and resolving straightforward queries, such as resetting passwords, updating addresses, or checking order and service status, in near real-time.
However, their ability to provide good customer service is often limited as soon as the complexities of human emotion come into play.
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Many people will likely have experienced frustrating conversations where chatbots fail to identify the nuances of requests or feedback and direct the customer through actions that ultimately do not resolve anything. Also missing is the ability to offer sympathy, support, and promises of prompt action — something many frustrated customers seek.
With customer expectations at an all-time high today, such experiences are detrimental to the customer experience and the brand’s reputation. Beyond the basics like quality service and fair pricing, customers today expect personalised interactions and connected experiences across all platforms. They want to feel important and worthy of attention from the brand they are engaging with.
In this sea of bots, brands need the “human touch” to stand out from competitors. How can companies provide a real, human-like experience in their customer service delivery without compromising efficiency and performance?
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ChatGPT and automation for customer engagement
ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot that has taken the world by storm, may be part of the solution. With its natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can understand the natural language spoken by humans and respond with coherent, fluent, and human-like responses in a fraction of a second. It is as if a person, instead of a machine, is answering your queries.
With the updated GPT-4 — OpenAI’s new large multi-modal model that can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy and accept both image and text inputs — the AI-powered chatbot is now more powerful than ever.
ChatGPT is transforming how businesses interact with customers as it can understand users’ intent and provide recommendations intelligently and conversationally. While ChatGPT brings empathy and intelligence to conversations with end-users, modern downstream automation solutions help elevate the experience further by provisioning the respective interactions.
For instance, vendors like UiPath have already developed a series of connectors to OpenAI ChatGPT to send prompts and receive responses, enabling businesses to look for specific information in the submitted text or to generate bespoke text based on the input.
The table “Possible use cases for ChatGPT” below shows some examples of how this works.
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What’s next?
With advancements in generative AI, businesses today have an amazing opportunity to enrich the customer experience. However, this transformation goes beyond customer experience to true end-to-end digital transformation.
Considering this, leading vendors have innovated to develop connectors to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities seamlessly. This allows businesses to remain focused on driving end-to-end digital transformation while cross-leveraging the best-in-class generative AI value proposition from ChatGPT.
Moreover, businesses can scale beyond customer interactions and contact centre applications. For instance, numerous interactions within an organisation’s IT service management systems, human resources, and sales operations can benefit from these capabilities.
A diverse ecosystem is emerging around GPT plug-ins, along with leading vendors rolling out OpenAI connectors, which allow businesses to cross-leverage automation and AI/ML capabilities to strive for operational excellence while driving best-in-class customer experiences.
Jared Danaraj is the vice-president of sales and solutions engineering for Asia Pacific and Japan at UiPath
