I joined Kristen Hayer on Innovations in Leadership, the Success League Radio podcast, to talk through where generative AI fits in customer success. A few moments from the conversation worth pulling out — the full transcript is here.
On AI freeing humans to be more human
We think that AI frees humans to be more human. There are three areas. First, with AI you can automate a lot of the low-value activities… The second area is that AI can also be your personal trainer or coach… And then beyond that, there's the pure power to have AI upskill workers. It's a bit akin to that scene in The Matrix where Keanu plugs in, connects to the desk, and then suddenly downloads all the kung-fu knowledge.
On treating ChatGPT like an intern
The way I like to frame it is: let's say you were to hire an intern. What would you have them do? I say "intern" because interns require instruction. They're not experts in customer support. And they're not always perfect — sometimes you're going to have to check their work, or you might have to make some corrections.
On defusing hallucinations
Instead of saying "ChatGPT, go generate a response for me," what you instead do is you give it a list of things to choose from, or you give it some content and you say "summarize this content." When you're giving it those sorts of tasks, it's much better able to identify that it's only supposed to be using that as the source material, versus giving it all human knowledge and saying "what's relevant out of this entire space of human knowledge?"
On capabilities, not maturity
A maturity model is a model that looks at what sort of level of tools or processes you have in place — level one, two, three, or four. A capability model looks at specific capabilities and outcomes. When an agent picks up a ticket, do they have the context of prior interactions? Do we have alerting in place to make sure we're actually able to meet our SLAs about response times, even when someone's on vacation?
On the disclosure bright line
If it's fully automated, you should definitely be disclosing — not even just for ethical reasons, but for expectation-setting and maintaining trust with your customer. And then really, it's the assistant that becomes more of a gray area. We wouldn't disclose if I was using grammar check to write an email. I wouldn't necessarily disclose if I was using Google Translate to help translate a message to you. So that's kind of my bright line: if there is a human involved, I don't think you necessarily need to disclose. But if it's fully automated, it's probably both ethical and also just best practice to disclose there.
The full episode is on Spotify and Buzzsprout. A lightly edited transcript is on this site.