Writing is one of the main activities that Customer Support pros do every single day. Even the best and quickest typers, can spend a significant amount of time crafting a reply to a customer.
Because some of the writing is repetitive, most helpdesk platforms offer a way to save a reply and reuse it later on for a similar customer message.
Using saved replies might help but they bring a few additional problems:
- Somebody has to create and maintain the saved replies as templates in some sort of library. This can be a tedious task especially for large teams where there are usually hundreds of such replies.
- The Support agents need to search for and find the appropriate reply. Again, this is easy if you have 10-20 replies to choose from, but difficult when you’re looking into hundreds.
- There is this assumption that a given set of customer inquiries, similar in nature, can be responded to with one saved reply. But usually, there are few cases where the inquiry is the same. Each customer has its own needs and can add its twist to the message, for example by asking many questions at once. Quite frequently, the support agent needs to adjust the saved reply to address the customer inquiry. This can take the same amount of time as if he was composing the reply from scratch.
- Saved replies can only be used with a small percentage of customer conversations. How about the rest?
Given that GPT3 is exceptional at producing text from a given prompt, I developed a pilot Zendesk app that takes the customer inquiry plus a short reply written with bullet points and generates a full reply that is ready to be sent to the customer.