There is nothing worse than when buzzwords are cannibalized for marketing instead of simplification
Patrick Kern
In the media, in marketing and in business, buzzwords have been used for quite some time. The introduction of #hashtags in particular has fueled this trend. In principle, there is nothing wrong with using buzzwords for certain topics to make them easier to find and spread. It becomes problematic for me when the buzzwords lead to misinterpretations.
Currently, everyone in the industry is concerned about the technology known as ChatGPT from the company Open.ai. ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a prototype of a chatbot, that is, a text-based dialog system as a user interface based on machine learning. As a speech-based application, ChatGPT offers the possibility of dialogic exchange. In the process, the quality of its responses fluctuates: according to AI expert Gary Marcus, it can express itself “brilliantly one moment and breathtakingly stupidly the next.”
Now an entire industry is pouncing on ChatGPT and looking to integrate it into their chatbot programs. That’s what moves technology forward. So, good for now. But, it’s still a prototype and has, as of today, only limited capabilities to answer the questions customers ask a company’s chatbot today. And so the pyramid of confusion begins below the buzzword ChatGPT. Because what companies actually need today is automation. But that doesn’t come until the very bottom of the buzzword pyramid. But let’s start at the top.
The pyramid starts with the buzzword ChatGPT. Below that comes the much larger area around chatbots. So, bots. Robots. These serve the third building block in the pyramid. Automation. And this is what is really needed at the present time.
Because the entire economy is suffering from a shortage of skilled workers. And so it is necessary, in addition to all efforts to mitigate the shortage of skilled workers through training, to use the existing and well-trained employees for the work in a company that cannot be automated. But there are hundreds, thousands of tasks in companies today, every day, that are the same over and over again and employ our skilled workers today. These include, address changes, account changes, information distribution to recording requests such as damage, faults or quotations. All of these tasks can be handled by an automated system, freeing up existing staff for the training of new specialists and the processing of high-risk tasks.
That’s what it’s really all about. – So my advice is that ChatGPT is important for the advancement of AI technology. But for the moment, it has no place in customer support. Here, the market should focus again on the automation of recurring tasks. This requires bots, but not always artificial intelligence, but does not exclude them in the further development.
The goal for customer support departments must be to increase customer satisfaction in an agile and innovative way by making cases and information available at all times through automation and at the same time freeing up their own trained employees for high-value work. Automation can be extended at any time and grows with you and your customers.
