Customer service reps, your jobs are kaput

How AI can very easily, with just what GPT has delivered so far, replace an entire service

Made by DALL-E

We have all been there.

We are steaming mad about something or in a tearing hurry to get somewhere and… we run up against The Customer Service Rep (CSR for future reference).

CSRs are the frontline workers of any big business but, usually, have little power to actually solve your issue.

Even if they do have the means to solve your problems, they still have to do it the slow, laborious way by pecking away at abstruse UI controls with a dozen prompts to make sure they aren’t violating any corporate guidelines against freeloaders.

The bottomline is that if you find yourself dealing with a CSR, your day is probably in the toilet already. And from the CSRs perspective, a majority of their interactions are with people who would do anything else, be anywhere else rather than on the phone talking to them.

What if ChatGPT (and its non OpenAI counterparts) could rectify this?

Here’s how.

The difference between AI and a CSR

For all it’s success in clearing the Turing Test, ChatGPT is a language model, not a person.

It can take abuse. It is unflappable in the face of people cursing it or fulminating. It can keep its eye on the prize — how to extract useful, actionable information from a ten minute diatribe from a customer?

While a CSR could justifiably breakdown emotionally when faced with a tough customer and either freeze or turn hostile themselves — they’re people after all — a ChatGPT bot won’t.

GPT Plugins

From the above section, it should be evident that GPT is superior to a CSR in extracting information out of a sea of jibes and ragebait.

Earlier, once the CSR had the information handy, they would take a call on how they could help the customer, then go ahead and take that action to assist the customer.

Now, the same can be achieved through GPT plugins — GPT plugins are how ChatGPT interacts with external services.

Those external services could be “read-only” where they supply up to the minute information about a resource such as, say, seat availability on flights or the weather in a particular location.

They can also be used to trigger actions. For example, if ChatGPT suggests a piece of code to you, it could also let you use a plugin to run that suggested code in a sandbox and verify its results.

Conclusion

Human powered customer support that actually works used to be a luxury reserved for the well-heeled whales of the world. The rest of us had to wade through pages upon pages of self-help documents and guides to solve our problems ourselves.

With ChatGPT and plugins, offering help to every user regardless of their usage tier is within reach.