ChatGPT: Revolutionizing Delivery & Service

In an age of technological transformation, OpenAI’s ChatGPT grabbed headlines for its uncanny ability to converse fluently on nearly any topic.  While the focus is often on what ChatGPT can generate, the true game-changer for delivery and service lies in what these Large Language Models can understand, and how they may help businesses resolve issues at scale.

Sometime in the very near future…

Mom taps on her smartwatch and says “Hey, Molly and I are going to the park now and won’t be home when that new BBQ arrives. Please set it up in the backyard and take all the packaging.”

The smartwatch responds quickly “No problem. I alerted the store, and they confirmed that the extra work can be included in your price. I also checked with the dispatcher and delivery team and they confirmed as well. If they have any questions, I’ll handle what I can and connect them to you directly for anything else.”

It was a sunny day, and Molly smiled as they continued on their walk to the park.

When a delivery or service starts to go wrong, quick communication is the key to resolving the challenge and avoiding costly reattempts, failures, and refunds. At Riptide, we’ve shown that starting a 3-way text between customers, drivers, and dispatchers let delivery and service teams efficiently bring the right people together in a conversation to resolve issues in minutes.

To manage the billions of delivery and service transactions worldwide, businesses look to automation to allow staff to focus on higher-level work and priority calls. Before ChatGPT, the prospects of improving productivity through chatbots seemed bleak with 78% of consumers frustrated by the inability of chatbots to meet their needs. 

ChatGPT changes all that with the fluency, understanding, and trainability needed to automate rapidly:

   Fluency – ChatGPT’s fluency is “bewitching” as TIME magazine described – the result of an enormous amount of data and computation that allows it to respond as if it understands what the user is saying.

   Understanding – ChatGPT uses the immense breadth of human knowledge, embedded in its model, to understand what people say. ChatGPT understands the intent, plans, and requests as they are expressed and responds based on that understanding. This breadth of understanding and depth of “conversational memory” underlie the flexibility of ChatGPT’s responses, making it well-suited to short conversations about a delivery or service transaction. 

   Trainability –ChatGPT incorporates new facts as they are added to a conversation. And, rather than coding new skills by hand, ChatGPT can be trained with new data (such as the 6 million issue resolution conversations in Riptide today) to significantly improve performance in specific domains. ChatGPT can interface with other systems through its API to pull in new information or take action. ChatGPT can even write code to interface with other systems.

Riptide’s machine learning team is applying OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other large language models to empower dispatchers to know:

   When to Engage – Riptide will review conversations underway, ask the AI “did the customer share new information?” or “were the customer's issues resolved?” and flag those conversations that require human attention.

   Who to Engage – Riptide will understand the situation in the conversation to update dispatch systems and engage other stakeholders as needed in the conversation.

   How to Respond – Riptide will suggest responses that a dispatcher might give or automatically respond on behalf of the dispatcher.

It’s time for delivery and service to get ready to ride this revolutionary wave. Gone will be the days of rigid websites, mobile apps, call trees, and stiff chatbots. Delivery and service experience will be judged by the quality of conversational interfaces that offer unprecedented levels of understanding and responsiveness. With billions of deliveries and services annually, dispatchers need all the help they can get.

Riptide is on a mission to help delivery and service businesses resolve challenges instantly by getting everyone in on a conversation. Join the conversation and let us know how you see ChatGPT changing service and delivery. 

And, yeah, ChatGPT helped me write this article ;-)