ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI that’s been taking the internet by storm and making waves across many industries.
Since its launch in November 2022, there has been lots of speculation about how ChatGPT will transform the world of work. While it’s still early days, you may have already heard about people putting its ability to generate well-written content to work on all kinds of tasks, from producing marketing copy to coming up with original company names.
We’ve been thinking about ways ChatGPT could help our users make complaints. We have also considered how it could be of use to Resolver Business users.
Here, we offer our thoughts on using ChatGPT effectively as a business. As well as highlighting some of the tasks it can speed up or assist with, we also consider some of its limitations – and when human intelligence may be irreplaceable to your company and customer base.
What can ChatGPT do?
With natural language processing capabilities, and the ability to learn from data, there are a wide variety of tasks that ChatGPT can help with, from improving operations to customer service.
ChatGPT can be applied in so many ways. Yet, with every task it can perform, there are a number of limitations and potential drawbacks that need to be taken into consideration.
Customer support
If you want to provide automated customer support, ChatGPT could be used to answer frequently asked questions and handle basic inquiries. This may free up the time of human customer service agents to deal with more complex issues.
At the same time, the lack of human touch, especially empathy, problem-solving skills, and nuanced powers of understanding and interpretation, means that ChatGPT will struggle with a number of aspects of customer service.
OpenAI warns that ChatGPT can ‘occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content’. For this reason, as Ming Cheuk (Element X Co-founder) explains, OpenAI has trained ChatGPT to ‘avoid giving advice when not appropriate (e.g if the answer is sensitive, has legal implications or there is no definitive answer).’
So while ChatGPT can handle basic inquiries, it is, in its own words, ‘not intended to give advice’. There may also be legal issues if the responses that ChatGPT generates are related to regulatory requirements or legal matters.
As well as being limited in its ability to advise customers on complex inquiries, ChatGPT may also be lacking in terms of customer experience. It is well known that most consumers dislike being responded to by a robot. As such, using ChatGPT may reflect poorly on your brand and approach to customer care.
Sales and marketing
ChatGPT has the ability to answer questions about products and services, and could even provide personalised recommendations. In this way, ChatGPT could be used to help a business grow by generating leads and increasing conversations and sales.
However, while it may give a really convincing answer, ChatGPT will make things up in order to generate them. So just like a bad salesman, it may tell someone what they want to hear, regardless of whether it is accurate or not.
Remember that even though ChatGPT can give a good sales pitch, there may be frustrations or even legal issues that arise later down the line if the pitches or responses to business inquiries it generates are misleading.
Research
ChatGPT can be instructed to gather insights and analyse data from customer interactions. This could be used by a business to identify trends, improve products and services, and make data-driven decisions.
However, ChatGPT only knows about things up to September 2021. It is also not designed to do thorough internet research.
Aside from the data you feed into it, the information ChatGPT uses to conduct research may be out of date or not particularly thorough. So while you can use it for specific data analytics, for anything broader, like market research, you will still need to conduct your own research.
Content creation
ChatGPT can quickly generate written content to be used for social media, blog posts, and other marketing materials. It can be a great tool for generating copy quickly.
Using ChatGPT in this way may save time and money, but the kind of content it produces will be highly generic. This may be fine if you want to quickly generate some text for your terms and conditions or a brief product description. But if you want your social media content to make your product or brand stand out from the crowd, human creativity is essential.
Language translation
If your business operates in multiple countries, or you need to work across multiple languages, ChatGPT can help you generate a quick translation.
However, unlike Google Translate, ChatGPT does not have much training in the nuances of specific languages and is therefore likely to make some common mistakes when dealing with complex language combinations. Early tests suggest that ChatGPT is better at translating content into English than the reverse. It also seems to be more proficient in some languages than others.
Technical expertise and ongoing maintenance
In all cases, implementing ChatGPT requires technical expertise and resources, particularly the ability to integrate it within existing systems and train it on relevant data. ChatGPT also requires ongoing maintenance and updates to ensure optimal performance.
So even if you are looking to use ChatGPT to save time and money, you will have to invest in the resources necessary for it to be deployed effectively and the ongoing maintenance and updates to keep it functioning well over time.
Legal issues you should consider
As well as the limited accuracy of the information it provides, when using chat ChatGPT in a business context there are some legal issues you should take into consideration.
Security, privacy and data protection
Using ChatGPT, especially to collect customer data and information may create a security or privacy risk if not handled properly.
As a business, you must always take appropriate measures to ensure that your customers’ data is protected and that it is collected and stored in compliance with laws and regulations. This also includes obtaining the necessary consent from individuals using it.
Intellectual property and terms of service
As an AI language model, ChatGPT does not have any specific rights or ownership over its interactions with users. However, the company providing access to ChatGPT will have their own terms of service. You must review these to ensure that your use of ChatGPT complies with them.
Whatever you are using it for, you will not have ownership over ChatGPT technology or any of its outputs. You may be able to use the outputs of ChatGPT for your business, but this is always in accordance with the terms of service.
Liability
You and your customers are responsible for any actions you take based on the responses from ChatGPT.
So knowing that the information it provides may not be accurate, you must remember that using this tool is always at your own risk.
Our verdict
We want to empower business owners to improve their brands by making great customer service easier. ChatGPT has a lot of potential as a technological tool to improve this and other aspects of your business by saving time and resources.
However, as with any tool, there is always some form of limitation or drawback that must be considered. We believe that you shouldn’t underestimate your own intelligence when it comes to creating a great business, nor overlook the potential costs that may arise from an overly optimistic or utopian approach to using a tool like ChatGPT. Making use of cutting-edge technologies is, in the end, always a form of collaboration that requires careful judgment and nuanced decision-making on the part of you, the human using it.
For more tips and help with your business’s online presence, why not check out Resolver Pro – Four brand new business packages created by the minds at Resolver – giving you access to insights and data tools, such as reviews, CMS and marketing.
If you have any comments, questions, or experiences of using ChatGPT as a business tool that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at support@resolver.co.uk