OpenAI’s ChatGPT is currently the hottest artificial intelligence (AI) app in cyberspace, surprising users with its ability to come up with seemingly human texts such as articles, stories, computer code, and even poetry.

But this is much more than a viral gimmick, and experts predict it could have far-reaching implications for many careers and industries, changing the way we work forever.

One of those is probably customer service. If you work in customer service, you know it’s already a hotbed of tech activity, from chatbots to advanced analytics.

Customer service jobs often involve talking to customers, understanding their problems, and working out answers when possible. After all, this is pretty much what ChatGPT does. So this may be a technical marvel, but is it going one way to redundancy?

Well, the answer is a little more complicated than yes or no. Luckily, a lot will likely be up to you, and how you react to the tectonic shifts sweeping the industry and many others.

So, see what impact we can expect and what steps we can take towards a future where AI applications like ChatGPT are embedded in everything we do.

First, what is ChatGPT?

Simply put, it is a conversational interface that can understand and respond to natural (that is, human) language input. Asking questions or asking them to compose a text such as an essay, poem, story, or speech obliges. In many cases it works so well that the average person can’t tell that what it produces was written by a machine.

It’s built on top of a Large Language Model (LLM) called GPT-3, so it’s pretty cool. LLMs (Large Language Models) are a set of algorithms trained on huge amounts of text, so they understand relationships between words in a probabilistic sense. This means that it has “read” so much text that it can predict with high accuracy the optimal response to the input it receives.

As a very simple example, a GPT-3 sized LLM, in its training data (consisting of over 175 billion data points), says that cats are furry, four-legged, and mammalian. You will come across thousands of statements. I like catching mice.

So, when asked, “What is a cat?” I know that, with a high degree of probability, the answer, “Cat is a furry girlfriend’s four-legged mammal who likes to catch mice,” is likely to be accurate.

ChatGPT is an example of what is known as generative AI. This is because we can generate entirely new output (text) instead of simply reversing the trained data. The field of AI technology is sometimes known as “Natural Language Processing” (NLP) or “Natural Language Generation” (NLG).

How are ChatGPT, LLM, and NLP used in Customer Service?

Customer service was one of the first areas where potential commercial use cases for this technology were identified due to its conversational question-answering capabilities.

However, it is important to remember that while ChatGPT is the most advanced public LLM conversational interface, it is not yet possible for general users (other than its owner, OpenAI) to train on new data. is. This means that they are unlikely to contain information relevant to your specific business and cannot answer questions about specific products or services. not yet!

With that in mind, here’s what LLM and natural language technology can theoretically do, and what future versions of ChatGPT can do soon.

· Answer customer inquiries quickly and accurately in a way that provides a far superior 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 inquiries.

· Summarize internal performance metrics such as response times and customer satisfaction scores.

· Provide guides and how-tos to walk you through the process your customers may have to follow.

· Empower human customer service agents to deliver satisfactory results by summarizing key points and providing a checklist of items that need to be covered in a response.

· Translation between languages ​​to enable agents to communicate with customers around the world.

I work in customer service, how can I avoid getting fired?

ChatGPT is definitely more impressive than your average customer service chatbot and is sure to get even better in the years to come. If you work in customer service and your job is just reading scripts or parroting out FAQ phrases when asked, you might be starting to sweat.

Fortunately, we all know that most customer service roles are a little more sophisticated than that. It takes a certain amount of emotional intelligence and empathy to understand.

As AI and related technologies such as ChatGPT become more sophisticated, those who continue to thrive in customer service may be those who learn to use and work with AI as a tool. By embracing the opportunities presented to them, employees in the customer service space have learned to enhance their innate human capabilities, becoming more willing to use technology tools to deliver solutions and do so faster. and effectively at scale.

Finally, it’s important to remember that the worst thing to do when faced with chaos like this is to bury your head in the sand and pretend it hasn’t happened. natural language AI tools are transforming many industries. Workers in these fields will need to stay up-to-date with new developments in their fields to stay ahead of the curve, and don’t be surprised if AI makes them more capable and efficient in an increasing number of tasks. need to do it.