Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for Finance, Procurement and Customer Service functions, announced that its Customer Service solution suite is getting a helping hand from ChatGPT, a natural language processing (NLP) tool included in Esker Synergy AI technology.

Built into Esker’s Customer Inquiry Management solution, ChatGPT provides Customer Service (CS) professionals with an additional resource to efficiently handle customer inquiries such as order status, availability, pricing requests and product information questions. This added element of AI assistance enables CS teams to answer customer requests on time, increase customer satisfaction, and focus on more impactful and proactive outbound efforts.

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“While not intended to replace a CSR, ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that improves the customer service workflows and the customer experience”

Shared inboxes allow multiple CSRs to view and reply to emails, but retrieving accurate data like order, pricing and shipping data as well as previous conversations from a variety of systems (ERP, email, CRM, chat) can add hours of work and is error-prone. With AI-supported technologies, these processes are sped up significantly, cutting handling time down to just minutes.

“Managing a shared Customer Service inbox can get pretty messy, with inquiries often falling through the cracks and frustrated customers on the other end,” said Aurélien Coq, Customer Service Product Manager at Esker. “ChatGPT analyzes inbound customer emails, queries different systems and generates an answer for the CSR to use. This saves incredible amounts of time, freeing up CSRs to perform more fulfilling tasks, and customers get what they expect — a quick and helpful response.”

The responses proposed by ChatGPT are reviewed, edited if needed and approved by the CSR, who answers the customer(s) directly. Human supervision ensures customers still interact with other humans; ChatGPT simply provides suitable suggestions based on the available data to assist the CS teams with speedy and accurate responses.

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The recent advancements in NLP based on AI technology now offer capabilities that comprehend and generate natural language text coupled with sentiment analysis. ChatGPT is valuable to CS departments for its ability to understand and respond to questions in a human-like conversational dialogue format. Due to the integration with other back-office systems such as ERPs, CRMs, transport management and warehousing systems, Esker’s solution understands emails through category classification actions, key data extraction and sentiment analysis. ChatGPT acts as a two-way translator between human natural language and system machine language and back between system language to natural language. It allows customers to communicate with internal systems in a controlled manner and supervised by humans.

“While not intended to replace a CSR, ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that improves the customer service workflows and the customer experience,” concluded Coq.

Bundling innovative AI technologies for over a decade now, Esker’s solutions are continuously evolving to address concrete business cases with Customer Service automation. By eliminating repetitive and error-prone tasks, automation enables CSRs to focus on building better customer experiences.

Esker will be expanding the use of ChatGPT for additional solutions within its Source-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash suites.

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