Chatbots Versus Customer Service Representatives: Which One Is Right For Your Business

Chat-GPT is a conversational AI chat-bot that was created by Open AI. It is an AI chat-bot that uses GPT- 3’s AI language model to interact with humans. 

A GPT is a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This chat-bot makes use of GPT’s Natural Language Processing function to carry out its various functions. These range from writing essays to answering customers.

A customer service representative on the other hand is a human who is employed by businesses to interact with customers. A customer service representative provides customer support by listening to any complaints that customers may have and offering solutions to these problems. Communication could be by phone, email, text or chat.

A customer service representative is able to take previous information about a customer into consideration and then create contextual solutions. 

What Is Chat-GPT?

As stated earlier, Chat-GPT is a conversational AI chat-bot that is powered by the GPT-3 language model. 

 It has been pre-trained with about 45TB of data. This data was obtained from various textbooks, websites and various articles. Its large amount of data makes it possess encyclopedic knowledge. It uses all of this knowledge to model its own language for responding to human interaction.

The pre-training gives it a human-like touch that allows it to carry out text generation in a human-like language. Its language accuracy is quite high.

Since its launch in November 2022, it has generated a lot of interest. Iit had up to one million users in the first few weeks of its existence. 

In response to the launch of Chat-GPT, Google has also talked about launching an AI chat bot, Google Bard. This chat-bot is still in development. While Chat-GPT and Google Bard have some similarities, the latter has been improved upon in some ways. 

Chat – GPT can be used to carry out various functions which are very useful for business owners, students and professionals alike. It has even been used by some people to try to hold conversations with other people! 

Listed below are some of the uses of Chat-GPT:

• It can answer various questions.
• It can help to translate languages. This is especially helpful in interacting with customers from different countries. It helps to make communication easier.
• It can create content, such as articles or writing poetry.
• It can write code and help programmers to debug code.
• It can help to retrieve information, as long as the information already exists in its large database.
• It can serve as a chat-bot for customer service.
• It can also carry out sentiment analysis. This means that it can review customer responses to a product or service and detect what the tone of the response is. It can state if it is a positive, negative or neutral review.

However, Chat-GPT has some limitations even as stated by it’s creators. Even though it is so amazing, it has a long way to go. It cannot totally replace the need for humans in carrying out customer service interactions yet.

Apart from the GPT, another popular language model is the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). This is a machine learning framework for natural language processing (NLP). Its language model is the basis for services like the Google Search Engine and Google Natural Language API.

  GPT-3 as a natural language model is suited to some tasks that BERT cannot efficiently do. One very important example of this is making human-like conversations. BERT is however bidirectional and this makes it more efficient at understanding language. It can understand contextual language as spoken in texts and conversations.

Comparing Chat-GPT & Customer Service Representatives

Chat-GPT by its function is an AI chat-bot that has been specifically trained to interact with humans in a human-like language, and it can be integrated into your business to serve as the sole method of interacting with customers. 

However, is this really the best thing to do for your business? 

Consider some of the advantages of using Chat- GPT for customer service in your business as stated below:

• Cost Reduction: Using an AI Chat-bot like this one reduces the cost of running the business. There will be no need to hire someone and pay for extra manpower.
• 24/7 Availability: an employee will only be able to attend to customers during work hours. The Chat-GPT AI chat-bot will however be able to perform the function of attending to customer complaints round the clock.
• Human-like interaction: Due to its training, it is able to generate text that replicates human interactions. It can also be modified by business owners to have some added form of human touch and better communicate with customers using a human-like language.
• Wide range of information: there is an expansive amount of information available for the chat-bot to draw from and create its answers for customers.
• Better customer satisfaction: most customer complaints are repetitive, and having a standard answer provided for similar complaints is very helpful for providing a pleasant experience for both customers and business owners.

As good as it is there are some disadvantages of using the Chat-GPT AI for providing customer service.

Some of these are: 

• Limited Information: at the end of the day, the AI only has as much information as it has been programmed to have. It cannot think and come up with solutions to questions that are not clearly phrased or require complex thinking. Also, it only contains information dating back to 2021.
• Bias and Stereotypes: The Chat-GPT AI bot contains information that has been provided by humans. This makes it likely to also exhibit the biases and stereotypes contained in the information it possesses.
• Inability to think creatively: the AI chat-bot cannot carry out creative thinking. It cannot come up with unique solutions, and neither can it apply real world information to problem solving. It does not understand contextual information.
• Data privacy: using the Chat-GPT AI chat-bot to attend to customers might pose a security risk to businesses. It needs to store customer data to be able to attend to their complaints, and this database may easily be breached by hackers.
• It may be frustrating for customers to use: Chat-GPT might be frustrating for some customers to use. This can happen when it is unable to provide solutions to the problems they have. It is advisable for business owners to be transparent with their customers. You tell them if they have to communicate with digital assistants such as the Chat-GPT AI.

Which One Is Right For Your Business?

Given all that we know now about the way the Chat-GPT chat-bot works, it is safe to say that we cannot totally cancel it as an option for customer service. 

It has its advantages, and in some ways it is even better than having a customer service representative attend to customers. For example, it is available 24/7. 

For optimal performance and the smooth running of the company, it would be best to use both options. The Chat-GPT AI chat-bot can serve as a digital assistant to the customer service representative. 

Both options have their unique advantages. It is impossible to totally replace the customer service representative with the AI chat-bot.

A customer service representative can go through a customer’s history with the company. They can then use this knowledge to proffer solutions. The solution will be based on the unique circumstances of the particular order that is in dispute.

There could be an option for customers to choose between communicating with the AI chat-bot or the customer service representative.

Or even better, the AI chat-bot could attend to all customer complaints at first and only redirect the more complex ones to the customer service representative. 

This could be done in the form of a prompt provided in the chat room. If the conversation proves to be beyond the scope of what the Chat-GPT AI chat-bot can handle, the customer gets referred to a customer service representative.

Doing this would reduce the workload of the customer service representative. At the same time it will make use of the advantages of using the AI chat-bot to attend to customer service problems.

Conclusion

In choosing between using the Chat-GPT AI chat-bot or a good old customer service representative for your business, there are many factors to consider.

The Chat-GPT AI chat-bot is undeniably good. It has been specifically developed to communicate with humans. It can also carry out various functions such as to generate content, text generation, sentiment analysis, information retrieval and coding. It has some limitations though.

Because of them, it can never totally take the place of a customer service representative in business operations. It can only replicate the human touch; it can’t ever be the actual thing.

Integrating the Chat-GPT AI chat-bot into business operations also comes with its own risks, and all of this should be considered before deciding to use it.

To get the best out of this conversational AI chat-bot, it is advisable to use it together with a customer service representative present. This would help to optimize both options.