ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management – How’s the Weather Where You Are?

Like many, I enjoyed seeing the responses that people have received by asking various questions to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the last week, I’ve read poetry, essays and even definitions of market segments like Digital Experience Management. Experimenting with ChatGPT seems like a lot of fun, but large language model (LLM) driven chatbots like ChatGPT can provide serious business benefits too. As chatbots become capable of having more human-like interactions, the potential for leveraging them for customer interactions increases. Forbes and VentureBeat recently wrote about the opportunity for ChatGPT to improve customer experience and customer service. First generation chatbots rely on pre-determined scripts to respond to expected customer queries. But LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT can provide answers to questions by understanding the intent of person asking them. Juniper Research projects that AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of this year. Even so, companies will still need to combine ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management.

Here’s why.

How’s the weather where you are?

We’ve all experienced it. You’re on the phone with a contact center agent who works for your favorite retailer, insurance company, or bank. You provide your account number and verify your identity. There’s an awkward pause. Then the inevitable question. It could be about the local weather. “How did you do in the big freeze (or rain storm caused by the latest atmospheric river) last weekend?” It could be about how your local sports team did in their last game. “What did you think of the Superbowl?” or, how you feel about this year’s Grammys. “Isn’t it amazing that Beyonce passed Georg Solti and won her 32nd award? But, don’t you think she must be disappointed after not winning album of the year for the fourth time?”

We all know why the contact center agent engages us in small talk. They’re waiting for their applications to respond so they can continue helping us with the transaction or query we’re trying to make. It’s easy to be frustrated with them, but it’s not their fault. Poor performing applications—whether CRM, or EHR, or inventory—have a negative impact on both customer experience and employee experience. I wonder whether AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT will be programmed to ask us these types of innocuous questions to fill up the time taken by slow performing business applications. Even they can, IT organizations will still need to augment ChatGPT with Digital Experience Management.

Employee experience and customer experience are tightly connected

The interaction between customers and employees in the contact center scenario shows the tight connection between employee experience and customer experience. Both types of digital experience depend on the technology, the applications and infrastructure, that connect the user journeys of employees and customers. A poor experience in one area causes a poor experience in the other. Especially for industries that rely on omni-channel interactions with customers or patients or citizens. Digital Experience Management is required to deliver excellent customer experience and employee experience, even with the advent of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management for customer experience

Here’s the first example: While LLM-powered chatbots like ChatGPT will certainly be of value to guide customers along their intended journeys, ChatGPT will be able to answer many of the expected (and even unexpected) questions that customers have when they interact with a company. However, it won’t be able to answer all the questions that businesses have around ensuring an excellent customer experience. Organizations will continue to rely on Digital Experience Management to answer questions like:

• What are the most prevalent user journey paths taken across my website?
• What steps in the customer journey are taking too long?
• What is the business impact of slow-loading web pages, in terms of revenue or abandonment rate?
• What is the projected business benefit if we invest to improve page performance by 2 seconds?

Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management platform, Riverbed Aternity addresses the questions and more through Aternity User Journey Intelligence. Watch this short video to see it in action:

ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management for employee experience

While ChatGPT will prove to be a useful tool for contact center staff to leverage in their interactions with customers, it won’t help eliminate the cause of poor application performance. Small talk about the weather, sports, or culture will still be required. I suppose ChatGPT can certainly help there too! But IT teams will still require Digital Experience Management products like Riverbed Aternity to proactively identify and resolve issues associated with the full range of business-critical applications on which employees rely. With Aternity, companies can establish Experience Level Agreements based on targets for response time for the most common business processes employees do. Things like looking up a customer record, processing a claim, or checking inventory.

Here’s another short video:

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As you think about incorporating ChatGPT into your customer service strategy, also think about how Digital Experience Management can help you achieve your goals. Unlike other vendor’s products, Riverbed Aternity delivers full-spectrum digital experience management, by contextualizing data across every enterprise endpoint, app and transaction to inform remediation, drive down costs and improve productivity. To see how Aternity can help you on your journey to improve digital experience, register to begin a Riverbed Demo today.