ChatGPT, Writing, and Customer Care | Customers, Etc.
OpenAI and natural language models are going to completely change how we interact with customers in writing.
I’m just going to go ahead and say it:
Over the next decade, the vast majority of customer care professionals will heavily rely on artificial intelligence (AI) tools for their jobs.
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT from OpenAI and I’m blown away, but before we get into that, I want to talk about writing.
Writing as a filter
Of all the ways I’ve interviewed candidates for customer-facing roles over the past decade, nearly everything has come down to one thing:
How clearly and effectively can you communicate in writing?
Sure, it wasn’t just about writing. If I were hiring a support engineer, you’d need to know how to code. If I needed someone to help wrangle our support inbox, help desk expertise was a must. Oh, and you had to have a heaping dose of empathy for customers. Of course.
But over and above all of that, you had to be to write. I was surprised at just how much I could learn about a candidate’s current and potential skill set based on their ability to communicate in writing. If you wrote a poor cover letter, forget it. It wasn’t going to work out. Conversely, you might have just a so-so hiring manager call, but if you blew me away on the written take-home exercises, I would race to push you to the next stage of interviews. Writing was (nearly) everything.
Why put such an emphasis on writing?
For one, writing is hard. Even for seasoned writers, you might get faster, but I’m not sure it ever gets easy. Brain fog exists. Writers block exists. If you have the ability to consistently push through the barriers your brain puts up to your ability to communicate, you can add a lot of value to any organization.
More importantly, good writing is meaningful to customers. It feels really good to be on the receiving end of a perfectly written email where the other person really listened and then responded with an expert recommendation for a path forward. This is doubly true for highly technical topics. Communicating clearly and effectively in writing increases the reader’s confidence that the writer knows what they’re talking about. Even if the majority of your work is over the phone/Zoom, being able to follow up with a well-crafted emails is incredibly helpful and makes you stand out from your peers (sales folks, take note).
(As an aside, when you hire an entire team of people who can communicate with customers at an exceptionally high level, it’s truly magical. Customers don’t seek out “their agent”—the bar is high across the board. Sales account executives ask “where’d you find these people?”)
So what about writing in a world of AI?
Perhaps you’ve noticed in the past four months that AI has absolutely exploded since the launch of ChatGPT in November of last year. Have you played with it yet? You must. I waited four months and feel confident that was a mistake. Get in there. Now. Anyway, new AI tools like ChatGPT are truly incredible and will change how we think about what it means to communicate well in writing.
ChatGPT: An Example
Check this out. Let’s take this example email response to a customer:
Hey, I’m sorry that’s not supported with your current version. You need to update the OS to 14.3.1. first. To do that, go to Settings. Then General. Then tap Software Update. Then click the Update now button. When you do that and restart your device you’ll be able to use the new feature.
This is the kind of email that if I saw it on a written exercise for a customer-facing job interview, I would very quickly flag the candidate as a “no hire”. The instructions might technically be correct, but the grammar is poor, it’s not friendly, everything runs together. Blech.
But lets ask ChatGPT to help1:
Could you rewrite the following email but in a more professional tone? Be sure to use bulleted or numbered lists as appropriate.
Hey, I’m sorry that’s not supported with your current version. You need to update the OS to 14.3.1. first. To do that, go to Settings. Then General. Then tap Software Update. Then click the Update now button. When you do that and restart your device you’ll be able to use the new feature.
Here’s what it came back with:
Dear [Recipient],
We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with your current version. In order to access the desired feature, it is necessary to update your operating system to version 14.3.1. We recommend following the steps below to complete the update:
Open the "Settings" app on your device.
Navigate to the "General" tab.
Tap "Software Update."
Click the "Update now" button.
After completing these steps and restarting your device, you should be able to utilize the new feature.
Thank you for your understanding and please let us know if you require any further assistance.
Best regards,
[Your name]
Uh, that’s really good. Not perfect, but it definitely passes my interview writing filter. The grammar is perfect. It’s polite. It uses a numbered list and multiple paragraphs to make the content easier to visually process. Did you notice how it even wrapped the names of the buttons in double quotes? These are all things I would have observed and noted when evaluating a candidates’ written exercise. It would have earned a very favorable review.
Now let’s go back to ChatGPT and see if we can clean up the voice and tone a bit.
Could you rewrite your previous email to make is slightly more friendly? Specifically, don’t use the word “inconvenience”.
And here is the result:
Dear [Recipient],
We hope this email finds you well. We're sorry to hear that you're having trouble accessing the desired feature. To enable this feature, you'll need to update your operating system to version 14.3.1. Don't worry, it's a quick and easy process! Here are the steps to follow:
Open the "Settings" app on your device.
Navigate to the "General" tab.
Tap "Software Update."
Click the "Update now" button.
Once you complete these steps and restart your device, you'll be good to go!
Please let us know if you have any further questions or if there's anything else we can assist you with.
Best regards,
[Your name]
Wow. Very very good. Not perfect—it broke the “only one exclamation point per email” rule and I’m not a huge fan of telling customers things are easy—but still quite good. Again, it would earn a favorable grade from me.
AI Hype and Promise
There’s been so much hype about AI recently that it can be hard to filter out the hype from the actual promise of improvement. I’ll admit that I’ve mostly been an AI bear when confronted with much of the hype. “Install this chatbot and you’ll be able to fire-I-mean-find-other-productive-work-for half of your customer support team.” Sure. Right.
The challenge with AI trying to replace humans is that it’s often uncanny. It seems to get things mostly right, but not quite. And when it doesn’t get things right, it feels really frustrating, especially when you know you need to speak with a human. I do suspect chatbots and the like will continue to get better, but that’s not where I see the most promise2.
One area that I’ve been excited about the potential for AI is its ability to assist a human in completing a task. In this area I think there is truly a tremendous amount of potential. It wasn’t until I tried ChatGPT that I realized just how far AI has come. A few things you’ll be able to do very, very soon:
Rewrite the following email draft to make it sound less defensive. I found myself getting emotional writing it and I don’t want that to come through to the customer.
Read this email from the customer and draft a sample response based on previous emails about the same topic.
Rewrite the previous email draft using the company’s voice and tone guidelines.
Review the inbound customer emails from the last week and produce a summary of the ten most impactful issues that can be shared with the product team.
Review the email I just sent and draft a knowledge base article using our public knowledge base style guidelines.
If you’re reading through the above list and are raising an eyebrow, I’m guessing you haven’t played around with ChatGPT yet. Like I said, if you haven’t already tried playing around with ChatGPT and you work in the customer care space, you absolutely must. Don’t wait.
The future of AI and customer support
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I fully expect that the vast majority of customer care professionals will use AI assistance as a core part of their job. Shoot, with Microsoft adding generative AI to Office, it’s likely you’ll see all knowledge workers benefit from AI assistance.
It’s not just about the productivity gains—though that’s going to be the primary selling point for a while—it’s also going to elevate the quality of communication across the board. Spell check and grammar check are so last decade. “Rewrite this email to be firm but polite” will become the new norm3.
What does this mean for hiring in customer support?
I don’t know yet. If AI assistance tools can help agents level up their game, you really do have to ask yourself how much a premium you should pay for expert communication in English if you can rely on AI assistance tools to do the heavy lifting?4 If your support team is in the queue 100% of the time, that's a very real question you have to answer. On the other hand, if you have a small support team with ample extra-queue-rricular work, you’re still going to want your team members to have the skills that come along with being able to communicate clearly and effectively in writing. How I go about interviewing for that in the world of ChatGPT? I’ll have to figure that out.
The ChatGPT examples that I’m providing are the exact prompts I entered and responses I received back.
This is worth a post all on its own, but I’ll clarify a bit. I really, really, really don’t want a world of “better chatbots”. Please. I get that chatbots will get better and in many instances they’ll come to replace direct human-to-human interaction for the many things that probably could have been answered via created good documentation and teaching customers how to use it. And if we can solve that problem, yes, that’s a win. But let’s not assume that this completely replaces the need for human-to-human interaction. When we try to 100% cut out humans in our interactions, that’s usually when we find ourselves nose-diving into the uncanny valley.
I showed my wife how to use it to “draft an email to the after care program to ask if we can get a refund even though we prepaid for the entire semester.” The email was outstanding. Normally this is the type of thing we would have worked on together because I have a knack for copyediting emails.
Expect the world to get a lot flatter in the world of customer support very quickly. I suspect a lot of B2B businesses that previously would have turned up their noses at offshoring support will suddenly find it much more attractive.