ChatGPT can solve problems so why can’t the customer service chatbot you’re communicating with?

In the era of ChatGPT, companies can no longer get away with poor-functioning customer service chatbots which fail to handle simple queries.

ChatGPT has shone a spotlight on poor-functioning customer service chatbots which will need mass reform – otherwise they could end up costing companies their customers.

That’s the view of ServiceNow’s Asia Pacific head of customer experience, Simon Bowker, citing research which found 75 per cent of customers would happily change providers if their issue were not solved within seven days. The average time to solve was found to be 7.3 days.

Mr Bowker said the AI revolution of recent months has shown how natural and easy it should be to chat with a chatbot.

“What ChatGPT is doing is raising the bar in some areas and showing that the experience of communicating through a digital tool should not feel like talking to a very simplistic version one robot,” he said.

Mr Bowker said he expected that in the not-too-distant future chatbots to be able to diagnose issues from a single photo or video.

ServiceNow Asia Pacific head of customer experience Simon Bowker.

“What this technology could do is present an enormous opportunity to get to the sort of status quo as to what’s the problem really quickly by allowing AI to do a much more informed categorisation,” he said.

Mr Bowker said chatbots in the customer service industry were not without their problems, and that early adaptation required significant patience from consumers.

“When we first started to see the emergence of AI in customer service, I often said that the customer at the end of the experience had to be a wizard or a technologist to get a sensible answer out of it,” he said.

In 2022, 96.5 million hours were spent contacting customer service, a figure up 7 million more hours than the previous year. The number of Australians who contacted customer service rose by 1.6 million to a total of 13.3 million, with each person spending an average of 7.2 hours contacting customer service.

The figures, from ServiceNow’s Australian Customer Care Report, found about 2.5 million consumers have moved away from always trying to speak to a person when solving an issue. However, many still felt companies were circling issues rather than trying to solve them.

“From our research we know one of the key problems that most companies are trying to solve is that most of us consumers feel like we’re being passed from pillar to post,” Mr Bowker said.

The welcome screen for the OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Picture: Getty Images

“After we’ve actually had the first conversation, we feel that companies are just spinning around behind the curtain and can’t easily find ways of connecting the teams and the dots to solve the problem.”

The report found that using a brand application such as a chatbot solved issues faster than speaking to an agent over the phone, taking about 54 minutes.

Resolving an issue by phone took 132 minutes, email took 114 minutes and online chats took 78 minutes. In-person took just six minutes longer than a chatbot at about 60 minutes.

Mr Bowker said the future of the customer service industry would only see more chatbots deployed and an upskilling of human customer service agents who work alongside them. Chatbots would also increasingly be deployed in companies to solve issues from IT to HR inquiries.

The pandemic had changed who was responsible for solving our problems when it came to work, Mr Bowker said.

“We were predominantly working from home during Covid and not in the office space so the responsibility for fixing your computer became our problem, not our company’s problem,” he said.

“All the digital services that we have today drive the need for more service. More and more of our lives are digital so the expectation is that we have less time to wait to answer problems.”