The Gist
- ChatGPT helps CX, says ChatGPT. According to ChatGPT, generative AI can improve customer experience outcomes in various ways, such as through personalized product recommendations, chatbots and virtual assistants, generating product descriptions, personalized marketing campaigns and predictive maintenance.
- Where generative AI is now. Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute, sees ChatGPT as a valuable tool for writers and customer experience outcomes. Is it fully integrated into the CX tools and outcomes landscape? Not quite.
- Chatbots and CX: CMO wants more. David Bitton, chief marketing officer of DoorLoop, would like to see chatbots take it to the next level and truly help sales, marketing and CX leaders with leads.
Reuters reported ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application of all-time. My Gen Z son Matthew could care less.
"I don’t mess around with fake intelligence. I am my own intelligence," he told me when I shared ChatGPT with him.
OK. Not all of us are convinced. Up to 100 million were convinced as of January, a couple of months since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted. TikTok took nine months to reach 100 million users. Instagram? 2.5 years.
Are customer experience and marketing leaders convinced of ChatGPT’s place in the world? We put that to the test catching up last month with Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute and David Bitton, chief marketing officer of DoorLoop.
“This is the real deal,” Roetzer said. “Everything changed Nov. 30.”
“We are,” Bitton said when asked if his marketing teams are using ChatGPT. “We are doing it daily right now.”
Latest With Generative AI News
Before we get into some practical customer experience and marketing outcomes — running them through the ChatGPT engine, along with our humans of the day, Roetzer and Bitton, — let’s look at some of the latest developments around the generative artificial intelligence breakout sensation.
It’s been 77 days as of Feb. 15 since ChatGPT debuted on Nov. 30. Here are some of the latest developments in and around the current GOAT of chatbots:
- Feb. 1: OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Plus. The $20 per month pilot subscription plan includes: general access to ChatGPT, even during peak times, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements.
- Feb. 6: Google responds. We were all waiting for it at the time: Google’s ChatGPT answer. Is it here? Google may think so with its release of Bard, an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, and now opened up to some “trusted testers” before it becomes “widely available to the public in the coming weeks,” according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
- Feb. 6: Microsoft responds. Microsoft announced a press event reportedly centered around AI and on the same day Google announced its ChatGPT competitor, and voila, some big news around the Bing search engine and Edge browser. Imagine this: the little AI startup rattling the trillion-dollar tech titans.
- Feb. 15: Our reporter has you covered. CMSWire's Jennifer Torres has us covered with all the latest advancements in AI in her new column.
How Generative AI Can Improve Customer Experience Outcomes
So we asked ChatGPT itself: Demonstrate some ways generative AI can help improve customer experience programs.
And here’s what it came back with:
- Personalized product recommendations: Using generative AI, a business can analyze a customer's browsing and purchase history, as well as demographic information, to make personalized product recommendations. These recommendations can be displayed on a website or mobile app, or sent to the customer via email or text message.
- Chatbots and virtual assistants: Generative AI can be used to train chatbots and virtual assistants that can interact with customers and help them with their inquiries or problems. These chatbots can be integrated into websites, mobile apps or messaging platforms and can be trained to understand natural language and respond in a way that mimics human conversation.
- Generating product descriptions: Generative AI models can be used to write product descriptions for ecommerce websites or catalogs, by analyzing a set of existing product descriptions and learning their patterns, it can generate new descriptions that are accurate, natural and engaging.
- Personalized marketing campaigns: Generative AI can help analyze customer data to identify patterns and segments, which can be used to create personalized marketing campaigns. These campaigns can be targeted at specific groups of customers based on their demographics, interests or purchase history, increasing the chances that they will be effective.
- Predictive maintenance: Predictive maintenance use cases of AI can be used to predict when a customer's product may need maintenance or replacement, allowing the business to proactively contact the customer and schedule a maintenance visit before the product breaks down. This can lead to a better customer experience, as the customer's product is less likely to fail, and they won't have to wait as long for repairs if it does.
ChatGPT's classic summary disclaimer: These are just a few examples of how generative AI can be used to improve customer experience programs. The capabilities of AI are constantly evolving, and new ways of using AI to improve customer experience are likely to be developed in the future.
Related Article: ChatGPT's Impact on Customer Experience and Marketing
Writing for Customer Experience Improves
Roetzer said we’re only seeing the beginning of what ChatGPT can be or will be. “It 's really hard to look out a few months from now even and say what's going to happen,” he adds.
He sees incredible value in a tool like ChatGPT for writers of all ranges. However, looking at that writing aspect only, ChatGPT can be effective in customer experience outcomes like emails, processing chat transcripts and a wide range of other capabilities.
“There's a spectrum of capabilities people have as writers,” Roetzer said. “So I think if you're an average writer, a tool like this could transform your writing. You’re going to still hopefully put your human in the loop editing to it, and you're going to fine tune it, and you're going to enhance it and add more of your personal voice and all those things.”
If you’re not a good writer, ChatGPT can help with a better first draft than you would do on your own. It can also bring in strategic thinking to your writing, helping you with outlines, a strategic list and providing more context.
“If you're a good to great writer, I think you're going use tools like this as ideation, inspiration and getting through writer's block,” Roetzer says. “I've been using it experimentally: We're going to write a new research report. Let me see what ChatGPT thinks the outline should be. Build me an outline for a research report about customer experience and B2B marketing. And I may have thought of eight of the 10 points that it comes up, but it might give me two points.”
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APIs, ChatGPT, Integrations with Customer Experience?
Are there APIs where customer experience leaders can simply integrate ChatGPT with their customer experience chatbots and, voila, you’ve got a chatbot run by ChatGPT for your call center agents? Not quite, Roetzer says. Granted, we spoke Jan. 11 of this year, and 30-odd days in today's AI innovation world seems like 30 years.
“It’s not there,” he said in our Jan. 11 interview. “But again, where we're going is the ability to train these tools on your data sets, your customer bases. And, in theory, you could see this: where it could communicate at a one-to-one level with you and I differently because it knows everything about us. Like all of our history, our emails, our products. … This is just the surface of what's about to happen. You’re going to have a bunch of brands and marketers trying to figure out how do we integrate ChatGPT and how's it going to change our workflows? And it's like, by the time you figure that out in two months, the next thing's going to be here, and you're going to have to reimagine it all again."
Customer Experience Software With ChatGPT
What’s going in the vendor landscape for ChatGPT? Since our interviews with humans like Roetzer, some have gotten into the party and are certainly touting ChatGPT integrations, predictably. Has any ChatGPT software integrations been revolutionary for marketing and customer experience professionals? ChatGPT Magic Quadrant or Wave coming? Jury's still out there.
Still, some vendors are getting into the party:
- NICE's integrated ChatGPT with its cloud native customer service Knowledge Management solution.
- Intercom's integrated ChatGPT with its customer service platform.
- Optimizely is integrating ChatGPT with its digital customer experience software, we were told on its upcoming CX Decoded podcast, and people are playing around with the tech.
- Glassbox, a digital customer experience analytics platform, integrated ChatGPT for customer data insights enhancements. Users will be able to ask business related questions in their native language and get specific data and insights they requested, company officials promised.
- Staircase AI, a customer intelligence platform, announced Feb. 15 Staircase AI Responder, a proprietary generative AI-powered intelligent response solution to support B2B post-sales teams.
We Still Need High-Quality Marketing Content
Bitton, DoorLoop’s CMO, is actively engaging with his marketing team to seek business-related ChatGPT outcomes. He thinks that chatbots will eventually get so good that it will sound like you're talking to a real person for real support or sales-related questions.
For now, the business impact of generative AI isn’t overwhelming, but it’s a daily marketing workflow, he added.
“It’s not going to replace everything we're doing right now, but it's definitely complementing and helping us with article outlines and content and stuff like that,” Bitton said. “You'll still need the human touch right now to make it really good, and Google will eventually figure out if it's AI-driven content. We still need really good, high-quality content. So for us it's more about quality than quantity, but right now it's helping us.”
The real magic for his marketing and customer experience teams with generative AI? Leads come to the site daily and ask questions. How much does it cost? What's the price? There’s not always a customer service rep or salesperson on the spot to answer these questions.
“So when they get back to them, four minutes later, they've bounced already,” Bitton said. “So I think if a chatbot could actually interact and pull data from the site and tell you this is the price, this is this. That would be a game-changer for us. We would get way more leads if we had that. Because right now the chatbots aren't that good. It's more like, oh, here's an article I think could work for you. So I think for support and sales, it would be a game-changer if we could integrate ChatGPT-3 into the technology.”
