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The Power of ChatGPT for Customer Success: A Revolutionary Approach

The CloudShare Team

Jul 06, 2023 - 4 min read

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Don’t buy into the hype about ChatGPT. It’s not replacing human customer success teams anytime soon.

Nor is it intended to do so. Artificial intelligence has always worked best when paired with human intelligence, and ChatGPT is no different. Savvy businesses already understand this.

That’s why they’re using ChatGPT for customer service and customer success in tandem with human expertise — and why you should, too.

Unleashing the Magic of ChatGPT

Okay, maybe magic is a bit of a strong word.

But you can’t deny that ChatGPT has enormous potential if you know how to use it properly. We’ve already discussed the many ways ChatGPT can augment the SaaS sales cycle. Turns out it’s even more valuable here.

When we asked ChatGPT how it can help customer success teams, here’s what it had to say:

These benefits also came with one very important caveat:

So, there you have it. ChatGPT can basically function as a secret weapon for customer success professionals. But those professionals are still very much required, not in the least because ChatGPT is not effective without the proper context and prompts.
In other words, it needs to be trained.

Training ChatGPT for Your Organization

ChatGPT is, at its core, a highly sophisticated chatbot. It’s not an experienced customer success professional, nor does it know anything about your target audience and objectives. This is all information you need to provide.

But before that, you need to know how to write an effective ChatGPT prompt:

• Talk to ChatGPT like it’s a somewhat obtuse colleague or acquaintance. You’ll have to provide it with more guidance than usual, including redirecting it to the topic of conversation if it starts to get sidetracked.
• Include as many clarifying details as possible. The more context you’re able to provide, the better ChatGPT’s response will become.
• Try to keep your prompt open-ended if possible. Give the chatbot some room to explore the topic.
• Consider instructing ChatGPT to engage with a topic from a specific professional or personal point of view. You might, for instance, ask it to describe the ideal marketing campaign from the perspective of its target audience.
• Try asking the same question a few different ways. You might be surprised at the impact a simple difference in phrasing can have.
• Ask ChatGPT to cite its sources if need be, but be prepared for it to hallucinate and present you with fake sources — it’s a common problem with AI that we’ve not yet been able to address.

Now that you understand how to write a prompt, your next step is to feed ChatGPT as many details about your business and audience as possible. As long as you keep your current chat window open, ChatGPT will remember what you tell it to an extent. With that in mind, key data points should include:

• Factual details about your business, such as industry, size, and region/market.
• Your mission statement and values.
• Your core business objectives.
• Details about your brand, including voice, tone, and general identity.
• Your audience’s needs and pain points.
• How your software addresses those needs and pain points.
• Demographic information about your audience
• Best practices and guidelines related to your marketing and customer success efforts.
• Any other relevant metrics from your customer enablement and customer success teams.

Using ChatGPT for Customer Service

Once you feel you’ve properly trained ChatGPT, it’s time to put it to work. As you likely gleaned from its response to our earlier prompt, there are a few ways it can help you improve the customer experience. It all depends on how extensively you want to leverage it.

A few of your options include:

• Embedding ChatGPT into your website via the ChatGPT API, allowing it to function as a customer support chatbot for your business.
• Connecting ChatGPT with your internal infrastructure to automatically generate content like quarterly business reviews or parse preprocessed customer success data.
• Using ChatGPT entirely via its web interface to help guide your customer success program.

With that said, ChatGPT is far from the perfect tool. When you use an AI for customer success, you need to understand what it can and cannot do. Here are some mistakes you’ll want to avoid:

• Don’t try to use ChatGPT to generate factual information — the only facts it can reasonably work with are ones that you provide.
• Don’t give up too soon. You’ll likely need to spend a fair bit of time training ChatGPT before you can effectively use it in your customer success processes.
• Don’t try to use the free tool. If you’re going to leverage ChatGPT in your customer experience and customer success efforts, you’ll want to upgrade to Plus.
• Don’t be surprised if you have to repeat certain points about your business in a particularly long conversation.

How Else Can You Use ChatGPT?

We’ve already discussed ChatGPT’s role in your customer success and sales teams. However, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what this tool can do, and the number of different ways you can potentially leverage it. Some other potential use cases to explore include:

• Marketing.
• Sales enablement.
• Accounting.
• Software development.