ChatGPT Just Changed Everything Revenue Teams Know About Chatbots

First, before we begin, if “ChatGPT” means nothing to you, it’s time to open up another tab and go check it out.

ChatGPT, as the name infers, is based on OpenAI’s GPT technology and is the conversational chatbot that has garnered more attention in the media than any AI technology to date.

ChatGPT has teachers worrying they will soon be rendered obsolete. Marketing people want to know if they can start working a fifteen-hour week, offloading many content creation duties to the service. And big players, like Google, wonder if they need to step up their game. The answer to those is no, no, and probably. For revenue teams, there is only one question: how does this help us grow? Do I simply replace my Drift, Intercom, or similar chatbot service with ChatGPT? Well, it does seem that with ChatGPT we have advanced from Chat Gen 1 directly to Chat Gen 3, skipping Gen 2 altogether.

Today, ChatGTP is a preview demo and there is currently no word on a production release date or pricing. Demo aside, ChatGTP will fundamentally change how people think about AI and how businesses think about chatbots. The earliest takeaway is that ChatGTP has definitely put an expiry date on legacy chatbots which rely on static questions and responses; requiring a tremendous amount of programming, and only designed to send even the most mild-mannered end-user into a white-hot rage, due to poor experiences.

Three Immediate Takeaways for Revenue Teams

1. Now Is the Time to Act
No AI or chatbot technology has gained anywhere near the level of attention and interest that ChatGTP has accumulated in a matter of weeks. ChatGTP has shown that chatbots can interact with humans at a level the common buyer hasn’t witnessed before. This advanced end-user experience means that buyers will become far more willing to engage with chatbots, and revenue teams will enjoy freeing up desperately needed bandwidth. The sooner revenue teams implement or upgrade their chatbots, the quicker they will see a higher rate of growth and customer retention than they were originally expecting.

2. Expectations Have Skyrocketed
If ChatGPT will boost buyers’ willingness to engage with chatbots, it will also dramatically increase the customer experience bar, in general. Buyers will think of chatbots as yesterday and ChatGPT as the future, expecting an amazing human-like experience from their brands immediately, and everywhere. This is great news for chatbot providers who are offering that true conversational experience based on GPT technology. Revenue teams can count on increased engagement and higher conversion rates, where chat can become a truly powerful channel for net new leads as well as the ability to nurture existing leads. This could become a revenue team’s dream. However, the news is not so great for those caught flat-footed leveraging only nested “if-then” workflows using traditional Gen 1 chatbot technologies. Legacy chatbots relying on ‘predefined rules or scripts’ are clearly operating on borrowed time.

3. The Pass-Off to Humans Will Drop
Back in the day, customers calling a business looked to bypass the phone options by hitting zero or shouting, “AGENT!” Why? Because automated phone systems almost never deliver, and earlier-generation chatbots have made the same process equally as painful. End-users search for support phone numbers and navigate through frustrating chat experiences, all in order to ultimately get to a live agent. “Chat to live” has been a necessary function, which is fueling many contact centers today. The younger generation starts with a digital chat, hoping to find the information they seek without talking to a human. When this fails, they search to be routed to a contact center agent who can determine their custom needs. This chat-to-live experience is necessary because there is only so much you can program into the current chatbot experience, and then maintain it, without overburdening the organization.

ChatGPT shows how sophisticated chatbots can fulfill customers minimizing the need to pass end-users off to a human. This will have significant contact center cost savings for larger enterprises.

When Will We See ChatGPT in the Wild?

Right now, that’s unknown. Even when it does appear, it may not be obvious to users that they are interacting with ChatGPT. How do we know this?

ChatGPT and its core underlying technology, GPT, have been a part of our research and development long before the ChatGTP demo launch. GPT-3 is one of several language models used in our conversational Chatbot. Using multiple models enables Conversica to deliver the conversational experience to Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams while allowing for a range of governance that enterprise brands require.

Conversica began working with GPT technologies in early 2020, shortly after OpenAI’s release of GPT-2 with 774 million trainable parameters. Today OpenAI’s GPT-3 has 175 Billion trainable parameters and is a core part of our AI automation suite that drives Conversica’s New Generation Revenue Digital Assistants™.

In Summary: The Future Is Exciting!

Intelligent chatbots are rapidly evolving. Intelligent chatbots with integrated GPT technologies will learn faster, producing human-like conversational responses that may become almost indistinguishable from their human counterparts. Humans themselves will spend a fraction of their time on high-volume, low-value, predictable work. Instead, every member of a revenue team will be directly impacting and accelerating growth. As for older-generation chatbots, we hear that Florida is a great place to retire, with fantastic weather at this time of year!