It might sound like a contradiction, but the new artificial intelligence platform, widely known as ChatGPT, can enhance the quality of the personal connection that you have with your customers. The secret is knowing how—and how not—to implement this technology into your daily workflow.
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a language model that can carry on natural conversations, respond to questions, and even generate texts like computer code, social media posts, and composition essays.
Typical of all new technologies, opinions about ChatGPT vary. Some people rave about the possibilities, believing this new AI will solve many of our everyday problems. In contrast, others worry that ChatGPT will replace higher-order thinking and jeopardize job security.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. ChatGPT won’t solve all of our problems, but it can be beneficial as a communication tool. It can simulate intelligence, but for all its algorithms and data processing, it does not think and feel the way people do. Perhaps most important for business owners, ChatGPT can help streamline your workflow and increase customer satisfaction, but it can’t replace the human connection offered by a live agent.
What ChatGPT Can Do
While ChatGPT doesn’t have the intelligence of a person, it is significantly more advanced than traditional chatbots, which opens up a number of opportunities for businesses hoping to enhance efficiency and customer service. It can be used to:
- Answer questions. While traditional chatbots are programmed to answer only a few simple questions, ChatGPT can understand and respond to a variety of more complex questions. It can do so simultaneously alongside other conversations, which makes it a good initial point of contact for customers with quick questions that can be easily resolved.
- Direct inquiries. For more complex problems, ChatGPT can accurately and consistently point customers to helpful resources or direct them to the appropriate department where their issues can be resolved.
- Collect and organize information. ChatGPT can collect customer information and other data points regarding customer concerns and behaviors.
- Generate reports. ChatGPT can also generate reports from the data it collects, ranging from processes to customer experience insights, making it much easier to evaluate and strengthen important areas.
- Generate leads. It can collect customer information that can be used for email campaigns and other target marketing.
- Write marketing content. While ChatGPT requires extensive oversight (see the limitations section), it can be used to help generate content ideas and even write a first draft of a social media post or blog article.
Limitations
While there are numerous possibilities for how ChatGPT can help support your business, the reality is that it’s not self-sufficient. Incorporating it successfully into your workflow will require careful planning, oversight, and maintenance, particularly as it relates to some of the platform’s significant limitations:Lacks critical thinking and empathy. ChatGPT can answer basic questions and respond to prompts, but it lacks the human intelligence required to fully consider elements of audience, cultural and historical context, and the nuances that make a message meaningful and persuasive.
- Inaccuracies. While recent updates have improved the accuracy of ChatGPT, its knowledge doesn’t go beyond 2021, which means it might not always be correct. Some have also reported that ChatGPT tends to make factual errors even with older information.
- Lacks critical thinking and empathy. ChatGPT can answer basic questions and respond to prompts, but it lacks the human intelligence required to fully consider elements of audience, cultural and historical context, and the nuances that make a message meaningful and persuasive.
- Potential liabilities. In addition to concerns that ChatGPT can be used to spread disinformation, it’s important to understand the risk that ChatGPT will copy content without permission from other sources or publish sensitive or offensive information.
Working Hand in Hand
The bottom line is that ChatGPT can be a huge advantage for businesses with the expertise and insight to use it strategically while also understanding its limitations. Though ChatGPT shouldn’t be the frontline of your communication strategy, it can provide important data points and increase efficiency so that you can focus on what really matters—your customers.
At the end of the day, technology is a tool to make our workflows easier, which ChatGPT certainly does; however, it’s best to leave the meaningful human connection to, well, the humans.