4 Ways ChatGPT Could Be Harming Your Customer Experience (and What To Do About It)

ChatGPT can make a huge difference to your business’s operations, workflows, and overall productivity. With the right prompts, the large language model can write your emails, supercharge your recruitment, and even give you more confidence as a business owner. But there’s a flipside. It can also harm your customer experience and even alienate potential users of your products and services. And no one wants that.

Angela Prentner-Smith is managing director of tech agency This is Milk and has been working in digital and customer experience for over 15 years. She has worked with clients such as Barclays, NatWest, and Scottish Government, instilling a customer-centric culture and method into their processes. Prentner-Smith studied human-centered design at as part of a masters in Design Innovation at Glasgow School of Art, and now trains and mentors other leaders and professionals in creating exceptional experiences for customers and prospects.

I talked to Prentner-Smith about the increasing prevalence of AI tools such as ChatGPT in the workplace, as companies experiment with the possibility of AI replacing humans in their customer support teams. Prentner-Smith believes that “Customers can tell when you use ChatGPT to interact with them, and they don’t like it.” She shared the four ways ChatGPT could be harming your customer experience.

How ChatGPT is harming your customer experience

Giving generic and non-actionable advice

Prentner-Smith doesn’t believe ChatGPT can give you innovative or disruptive advice because “LLMs like ChatGPT were trained on existing models and data.” She said, “If you ask ChatGPT for effective marketing techniques or suggestions for improving website conversions, you will get a remix of existing knowledge.” To take your customer service experience to the next level, employ truly novel ideas and avoid rehashing old ones that others have already tried.

Prentner-Smith also believes that ChatGPT shouldn’t be relied on for advice about customer experience because it will be too generic. “It won’t take into account your entire customer experience strategy or tell you when your online sales flow doesn’t fit the mental model of your customers.” For that, you need a human. What’s the alternative? Instead of taking what you read at face value, move beyond what ChatGPT delivers. “Work with CX professionals to make sure you understand the needs of your target audience,” she added.

No benchmark for customer experience

Not only is the advice that ChatGPT channels through your customer support agents generic and non-actionable, according to Prentner-Smith, but it doesn’t know what constitutes a great customer service experience. “ChatGPT’s answers are based on publicly available information, so when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, optimizing websites, and improving marketing strategies, ChatGPT might have been trained on content from people and companies doing a mediocre job,” said Prentner-Smith.

The companies with the best website conversion rates probably haven’t shared their methods online, so ChatGPT doesn’t know the strategies, decisions, or processes that created their success. Prentner-Smith advises you don’t rely on ChatGPT to guide your research and development because you “may reinvent the wheel” in a suboptimal way. Instead, “trust the CX experts within your organization to listen to customer feedback and innovate your products accordingly.”

Lack of empathy

The last thing you want is for your customers to feel unheard and unimportant, but that’s what could happen if you rely on ChatGPT to power every interaction. Prentner-Smith determines empathy and curiosity to be the most important drivers in making excellent experiences for customers, because “these human skills set us apart from machines.” She said you should, “understand your customers at a deeper level to deliver an exceptional experience, not just serve a transaction.”

Instead of running customer support questions through a chatbot without questioning the tone, get deep inside the minds of your customers to understand their predicaments. Why do they get frustrated with your product? What emotions are conveyed in your marketing messages? How can you empathize with their every concern and address it specifically in your product, service and responses? Thinking this through will mean that, even if your approach is AI-powered, you don’t lose the human touch.

Inability to understand task-based decision making

Your customers don’t act based on their demographics. They act based on tasks. “They have real reasons and specific needs for visiting your website, walking into your store or creating an account on your app.” Prentner-Smith believes dumping people in simple demographic buckets risks alienating customers, and wants to ensure you don’t fall into the trap. Instead, observe and learn about potential and current customers. Dedicate resources to understanding their behavior and tasks so you can improve or invent what best serves their unmet needs.

Treating customers a certain way depending on their demographics alone is a risky approach, one that could fall for stereotyping and bias, cause a loss in trust, or miss opportunities to really understand. Assume that people make decisions based on their intent, rather than their age, gender or location, to keep your customer experience efforts on the right lines. If you’re using ChatGPT to get customer experience ideas, describe your customers in terms of the deepest desires and biggest fears that relate specifically to the task in hand.

Is ChatGPT harming your customer service efforts?

Too much of a good thing is often a bad thing, and this could apply to using ChatGPT to enhance your customers’ experience of your company. If taken too far, it could over-engineer your processes to the point where they don’t speak to the specific needs of your customer. For optimal customer adoption, satisfaction and retention, Prentner-Smith believes humans can’t be ignored.

Instead of tapping a few prompts into ChatGPT and doing what it recommends without questioning, keep thinking critically about your operations. Channel advice through your company’s own process and quality standards. Use it to enhance, not replace. Use it for ideas, not advice you take without questioning.