A brand’s approach to customer service is a make-or-break opportunity in developing lifetime customer loyalty, but the flood of inquiries inundating contact centers since the pandemic has left brands struggling to keep up with the pace of issues across channels. In fact, addressing agent burnout is a top two priority for contact center executives. While AI-powered chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technologies have helped contact centers scale with customer self-service models, complex issues compound the demands on agents.
The advancements in AI with Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT technology are going to revolutionize customer service and redefine the modern contact center. In doing so, this new type of AI will help brands generate new engagement models and revenue opportunities.
It’s important to first establish how LLMs—often referred to as generative AI—differ from the type of AI that we’ve experienced in customer service to date. Trained in vast amounts of data, LLMs excel at summarizing, synthesizing and composing content. As OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed the world, these models can be interacted with in a very natural, conversational way.
This level of interaction is a significant divergence from the type of AI we’ve historically seen, where chatbots have been trained to respond to pre-designated key words and phrases, triggering workflows that return what is often generic information. This can be a helpful starting point in offloading repetitive inquiries, but it doesn’t account for the nuance of human language and corpus of relevant information to address the issue. In a controlled experiment, Brynjolfsson and colleagues found that customer service agents with access to a generative AI-based conversational assistant were able to resolve 14% more issues per hour than those without access.
