We know it exists: persistent grumbling about the fact that we are always trying to save costs in customer contact and customer service. Meanwhile, everyone was and is busy eliminating and automating 'simple customer contact' – a kind of cheese slicing method. Now that customer contact automation with ChatGPT has entered a new phase, the question arises when the last customer contact employee logs out. 

First a bit of 'cheese slicer 2.0': outsourcing. Translated in an annoying way: your mess for less. Nowadays it is no longer very complicated to put Dutch customer contact specialists to work at locations with a wage cost advantage such as Suriname, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Morocco or South Africa. This is possible through your facility partner, but you can also set up a 'captive' yourself – as long as you have a cloud-based workplace and enthusiastic people who like to sit in a sunny spot with a laptop.

But forget about that employee in the sun, we will hardly need them later. Automating and eliminating customer contact will soon be even better with ChatGPT-4 or one of its successors. Provide ChatGPT-4 with the correct data and context and off you go. Of course there are still a lot of problems around ChatGPT for which there is no solution yet. Where is the input we provide to AI? OpenAI runs in Azure, something the US government has access to, which is not GDPR-proof. How can we be sure that, based on all the inputs we all provide, ChatGPT is developing in a balanced way instead of showing more and more bias? To what extent are we sure that other companies will not learn from our input via ChatGPT? So work on the shop.

But still: step by step we are taking the human out of customer service – often referred to as 'we are taking the robot out of the human'. You can also turn this around: removing repetitive tasks from agents means introducing the robot – something we have been doing for years. Meanwhile, concerns are audibly growing about the development that more and more companies can no longer be reached by telephone – digitization is the gateway to automation.

Will the agent continue to answer customer questions?

“Yes, but agents are needed for the more complex tasks; and there will always be new questions.” They only end up in the knowledge base after some time after the internal knowledge holders have laid their eggs – but that process can also be automated in the near future. A matter of letting AI listen carefully to all recorded conversations.

click to enlarge – source: ChatGPT-3.5, March 29, 2023

“Yes, but the difference between an employee and a chatbot is that the employee can show empathy.” Well. Anyone who gives ChatGPT a targeted assignment (Provide me with an empathic answer on the following statement to an energy supplier and include at least two possible solutions: I can't pay my energy bill due to high inflation) gets a super empathic answer back with two meaningful solutions including a payment scheme. Leave the pronunciation of this text to a pleasant voice and almost all your customers will be happy. The customer contact person of the future: is that someone who communicates with customers or is it someone who directs bots?

Doing things right/doing the right things/doing good

What remains is making (complex) considerations with a moral tinge, in other words: making morally sound decisions. How much understanding do we have of the customer's perspective? Are we going to grant that payment arrangement or not? How much effort are we putting into this customer problem? How far are we going to ask? That is precisely where the last challenge for human customer service lies (for the time being): giving customer contact employees the responsibility and authority to really manage the relationship with the customer. (Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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