Let’s face it, as business owners we have so many things to do that we’re often looking for ways to do our work more efficiently so we can move on to other things. And ChatGPT for small businesses can allow us to do just that.

This AI chatbot developed by OpenAI is revamping the way businesses operate, by providing unique answers and solutions in response to user input. In this article, we will look into the world of using ChatGPT for small businesses, explore its capabilities and shortfalls, and discover how you can use this powerful tool to streamline your small business operations.

Understanding ChatGPT for non-techy people: Powering the Future of Business

ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot, so it’s basically a really smart computer that you can talk to and it will respond to you (aka generate a unique response). ChatGPT uses a large language model which has been trained through a process called machine learning, where it basically learns from tonnes and tonnes of text from books, websites and the internet.

With this knowledge and its understanding of language, ChatGPT can perform a type of artificial intelligence called natural language processing. That means that it can process, understand and generate human-like responses when you talk to it or ask a questions, almost as if you were talking to a real person.

So, in essence, ChatGPT is a smart and highly trained language bot that uses machine learning and natural language processing to have meaningful conversations with you, find information and help you with some tasks.

Using the Potential of ChatGPT for Small Businesses

There are a few different ways in which you can use ChatGPT for small businesses. All of these come with some amount of limitations, and this will constantly change as ChatGPT learns from more and more data.

Here are some ways in which you can currently use ChatGPT in your small business.

Automating Business Processes – ChatGPT for Small Businesses

We all have processes in our business that we do time and time again, and those business processes can now be automated with Zapier and ChatGPT. You do need the GPT Plus account which currently costs around $20 a month and you need to activate plugins in the Beta Features. And then you can integrate ChatGPT with Zapier (and other plugins) and you can use it to build custom automations to automate processes within your business.

Example processes I’ve played with automating include:

• Importing a video into ChatGPT and using it to create social media posts and then scheduling them out automatically either directly to the tool or via your social media scheduler (which is my preferred method because I would want to edit the content before it goes out.
• Writing social media content and sending it to Notion or Google Docs to store it before sending it to your scheduler (I store all of my content in my Notion Content Database so I can easily repurpose well-performing content and am not reliant on my social media scheduler, in case I switch apps).
• Saving for example a social media post when someone likes it to a document to collect only the posts that are getting interaction
• Auto generate replies to emails and saving them as draft and then pinging you in slack that you have a new email to review and send.

These are just some examples of using ChatGPT for Small Businesses, you can use this in ALL areas of your business, like customer onboarding etc. so this is REALLY powerful, but needs to be monitored for quality. I will definitely be sharing some more about how to set this up and some use cases as well in future.

Improving Customer Service

One of the ways in which you can use ChatGPT for small businesses is to create a chatbot that assists your customers with the most common questions and challenges they may face. You can use it to help you automate some of the customer service processes, and that leads to reduced costs and frees up time for your customer service person to tackle issues that can’t be fixed with a bot.

The advantage of this is that ChatGPT runs 24/7 and can provide answers instantly, which is particularly great for those of us that have an international audience. ChatGPT itself is already trained on understanding and processing language, so all you need to do is to train it on your business and your processes, and it will take it from there.

Generating Leads and Boosting Sales

This chatbot can also help to engage potential customers, gather their contact information and therefore help to generate leads for your business. So this could be a chatbot on your website that offers one of your lead magnets relevant to something the user has just engaged with, or in response to a question the user had. It can also help users to understand which of your products or offers is right for them.

Personalised Marketing at Scale

You can also use ChatGPT for small businesses to help you personalise your marketing campaigns. Giving it data and insights about your customers can help you to create personalised product recommendations and targeted email campaigns, therefore helping you to send relevant and engaging content to your audience.

Streamlining Social Media Management

ChatGPT can also help you to speed up your social media processes by helping you to repurpose content, giving you ideas for topics you can cover and writing entire video scripts for you. This will mean that you’re able to produce more content faster, and can alleviate empty page syndrome. The chatbot I mentioned earlier could also be responding to your social media DMs and comments automatically, therefore making sure you’re engaging with your audience and replying to message – even while you’re sleeping.

Elevating the E-commerce Experience

For e-commerce businesses, a chatbot built on ChatGPT can help your potential customers to find the right product for them quickly, therefore reducing any friction in the shopping process. It can also answer questions on refund policies, or shipping terms, giving your potential customer the chance to make a purchasing decision quickly without having to look for this information on your website first. Plus you can use the questions your bot is being asked to improve the information you communicate on the website in the first place.

Drawbacks of the current language model

ChatGPT also has its drawbacks and is far from perfect. There are a few things you need to consider and understand before you get started.

1. Privacy and Intellectual Property Issues

It’s important that you understand that the Chat Version of GPT uses the input you give it to continue to train its language model. So while it’s unlikely, anything you tell it could be resurfaced again to another user in future. So you should not be uploading any information that is protected under privacy laws (eg. actual customer data) and intellectual property rules (eg. a trademark framework of one of your programs). This does not apply to the Playground or any tool that connects to the GPT language model via the API (eg. Menekse Stewart’s Marketing Magic App).

2. Limitations of the model

The model has limited capacities right now and something just loses track of the conversation. So it’s important that you feed it prompts one by one, check back that its understood what you mean and want, and also ask it if it needs more information for a good output.

Sometimes if the conversation goes on for too long it will forget that you have given it that information already and will start spitting out non-sense.

Also due to something called Prompt Drift using the same prompts over time may result in a worse result than when you started using that prompt. This is because the language model keeps learning and developing. It’s as if you ask your best friend a question when you’re both 18 and they say they never want to get married. And then they get married at 32 because their model of life kept developing and they changed their mind.

ChatGPT is also constantly learning and developing and therefore your prompts also need to keep developing. I recommend keeping a prompt library for example in Notion and then constantly updating the version of the prompt that is working RIGHT NOW.

3. False and biased information

Sometimes ChatGPT will have what is literally called “Hallucinations”. That is when ChatGPT confidently gives you false information. So you may ask it to give you some studies around a certain topic, and it doesn’t have this information. So instead of just saying “hey I don’t know that” it confidently generates a response with false studies and false names. So you always want to check the information that is factual to make sure it’s actually true. Also considering the data that GPT has been trained on, the information it has been fed may be heavily biased.

Read More: One of the issues you may run into as you use GPT is Prompt Drift – and you can prevent this by using a prompt library for your small business

All in all, while we still have a long way to go before we can let these processes run and trust that everything works, this already gives us the opportunity to save a lot of time and effort on the repetitive aspects of our work. Have you started to integrate ChatGPT into your workflow? If so, feel free to drop a comment with your favourite use case!