Will ChatGPT Replace The Contact Center Agent?

Founder & CEO of Centrical, the next-gen employee engagement and performance management platform.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) model based on OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT). This AI model generates human-like responses and text for almost any question or request, and it has caused an uproar because of the power it has to transform how we do anything.

In the context of work, some are embracing the technology because it can streamline their job, and others are concerned it may put their job at risk—with regards to the contact center, in particular: Automation has been knocking at the door of the contact center in the form of chatbots, interactive voice response and other services to speed up and optimize customer service.

So, what’s in store with the latest innovation in AI? Will ChatGPT be the end of contact center agents?

The short answer is that it will not replace the agent anytime soon, but it will transform the role as we see it today. While it is not certain that automation will ever fully replace the human touch and emotional intelligence (EQ), there will be new challenges and opportunities to enhance customer service. Namely, ChatGPT will:

1. Increase Customer Service Expectations. ChatGPT will usher in the next stage of self-service. More and more customer service needs will be answered using automation to create a self-service experience, which will mean human agents will be needed for more complex, multi-system, dynamic and emotionally driven customer service interactions. This will create a greater need for continuous learning and formal reskilling and upskilling programs to prepare agents to deliver best-in-class customer service.

2. Personalize Content And Accelerate Time To Proficiency. With the need for more training will come benefits in how training content is created. ChatGPT can help generate content a lot faster for training and onboarding new agents. It can be used to create text summarizations and training material from long-form content and optimize content over time based on agent understanding and customer resolution. Content can also be personalized for the agent and delivered in a format that suits their learning style. This creates a significant opportunity for contact centers to leverage ChatGPT to reduce content-creation time while also keeping content specific, updated and dynamic.

3. Help Agents Differentiate. ChatGPT is an innovative technology for agents that provides new and fresh content at their fingertips. It takes automated response to a new level because it is conversational in nature and not restricted by a library and current source machine learning. The AI can also leverage coaching interactions, customer sentiment and other interaction data to continuously optimize customer interactions, ultimately improving resolution rates and customer satisfaction.

At the end of the day, automation provides value to the way we work and ChatGPT is no different. But let’s be honest: How many of you still press zero multiple times in a row when you are greeted by a bot because you just want to interact with a human? It will take time for consumers to become comfortable enough with the technology that it can completely replace humans, if ever.

Microsoft invested $10B in OpenAI, and just launched Bing integrated with ChatGPT. GPT-4 will be released next. Google recently released its own NLP engine, LaMDA, and recently launched Apprentice Bard, a ChatGPT competitor. (However, when Bard provided a wrong answer in February, Alphabet’s market value dropped $100 billion.)

As humans, we need to evolve. The survival of the fittest in the workplace is more relevant than ever. People lost their jobs to machines at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. However, people who embraced the changes increased their productivity and became more relevant. The only way to keep up is to keep learning, reskilling and up-skilling. Focus on the relative advantages and be more creative.

Companies will need to quickly embrace ChatGPT or similar technologies to provide a better self-service experience to their customers. It could be utilized to create and improve the role of the frontline agent, who when augmented with AI technologies, performs better, handles more complex issues and learns and re-skills faster.

In short, this is nothing less than a revolution; companies and employees will need to adapt to the change in order to keep thriving.