Self-service and GPT-3: A match made in consumer heaven

Over the past week, it was near impossible to avoid media hype around OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. Our friends at OpenAI did something very innovative yet simple: they took their GPT-3 language model and gave it a chat front end. Then they invited the world to play with it, and the results speak for themselves: Over 2M user accounts opened, servers that hit capacity, and hundreds of thousands of media articles. Not to mention, the mind blowing responses to this industry-changing technology.

At Pypestream we have been waiting for something like this to emerge and prove to the world that humans and machines can have meaningful conversations. It is a piece of technology that, when added to a broader platform with myriad other technologies, can have unprecedented implications for users. And that’s exactly what will happen in the area of customer service and the acceleration of customer service away from call centers and towards self-service.

Self-service technology has become an increasingly important aspect of customer service as consumers continue to demand more convenient and efficient ways to resolve their issues and complete tasks. With the proliferation of digital channels, self-service has become the new standard for modern customer experience.

One of the key elements of successful self-service technology is an advanced user interface that makes it easy for users to understand and navigate. This can include gestures, swiping, and graphical micro-interactions that make it intuitive and straightforward to use (think Uber’s app interface). This is where the perfect marriage is made as these graphical front-end elements act as a modern UI (user interface) to natural language understanding (NLU) engines like GPT-3, which helps the automation system provide the right digital workflows for the user to navigate through.

When done right and using the cloud as the foundational technology, users don’t need to call an agent in a contact center for help because they can resolve their issues and complete tasks on their own. The combination of AI with automation and transactional capabilities delivers the ultimate customer service experience. A byproduct of this is rapid cost-savings for companies; in that self–service significantly reduces the workload for contact center agents, allowing them to focus on more complex and high-priority tasks. In essence, the power that an agent has is now available to the end-user through self-service technology.

There are many effective use cases for self-service, including account management tasks, such as updating billing information or changing a password, troubleshooting issues with products or services, and providing recommendations or personalized content (or products) based on user preferences.

So, when contemplating digitizing and modernizing your business, embracing technology like GPT-3 as part of an automation strategy for customer service is essential. It is recession proof technology that will provide consumers with convenient and efficient ways to resolve their issues and complete tasks quickly and easily, without the need to call a contact center agent. This not only improves the user experience, driving high retention through improved NPS, but it also helps to ease the workload for contact center agents, reducing costs and improving overall efficiency.