Alexandra Latter is the Director of Professional Services for OnCall Health and a member of Vitally's Success Network.

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AI tools don't have to be scary for Customer Success professionals. 

In one afternoon, I built a bot that has already saved my team and my clients hundreds of hours. Here’s how I leveraged ChatGPT to improve our customer experience and keep our team focused on higher-level work.

The Problem

OnCall Health by Qualifacts is a software service that enables healthcare providers to offer telemedicine services to their patients. Our clients need lots of different kinds of forms, such as intake, consent, or referral forms, for example. 

We used to build all these forms in JSON — a data interchange format that’s used in many programming languages. But every time a new client wanted a form in our database, we would need to either copy and paste the JSON into a new form object, or completely create new JSON to support the form. 

This took hours. Some accounts launched with 10-plus forms, and as we continued to go upmarket, this number got even higher (20-50 forms per account). 

Every CSM was responsible for learning JSON, building out these forms, and then adding them into the database, so providers would be able to access them on the front end. Every clinic's forms look a little bit different, which means it's not a replicable or scalable process. 

The Product Team’s Solution

Our Product team iterated and eventually made a form builder tool, which was amazing. Clients could drag and drop fields into a form, similar to Google Forms. The coding was all done on our backend. Now clients could build and edit forms themselves. 

But guess what? New clients onboarding to a platform for the first time don't want to manually create 50-plus forms for their organization. 

My AI Solution

Once I realized that our form builder tool wasn’t an ideal solution for our customers, I decided to build a GPT Form Builder that can scan pre-existing PDFs and word docs and auto-converts them to the JSON that we copied into our database. 

The request we heard over and over again was, “DocuSign has an option where I can just upload a PDF and rip the questions from the PDF into a form.” That's where my thinking turned to, “Well, if I could just upload a PDF and get something to spit out the questions for me, this would save us a lot of time."

One thing that’s pretty universally known about chatbots is that they thrive in spitting out code. I mean, obviously: It's a computer, that's how it talks to itself.

So when GPT-4o offered the option to start uploading documents, I figured, If I prompt this correctly, I can get it to a place where it would spit out the JSON in the way that our platform ingests it without any grammatical errors. 

And so I just tried. Honestly, it wasn't that hard, and it didn't take that long. If you understand logic, and you understand how not to contradict the instructions that you're giving, it's actually very straightforward to build. It took me one afternoon. 

The Benefits

1. Saving Time and Money

If one form took about an hour to build, this does it in 30 seconds to a minute. So, if one customer had 50 forms, it's going to be 50x the time savings. I can't even tell you how many forms I've built in JSON or through the form builder, and how much time this will have saved us collectively. It's like saving the salary of a whole person.

2. Allowing Teams to Spend Their Time on Strategy

This bot has been helping to keep the product team more mission-focused, because they don't have to do sprints addressing internal use cases like building forms faster. It gives them their time back so they can continue focusing on the roadmap, which ultimately helps the bottom line of the business.

3. Warming Up the C-Suite to Invest in AI

I'm one of two or three people on the team who has a paid GPT account. The more we build with it, and the more I show them that it's necessary, I think they'll continue to warm up to this as an investment. It's around $25 per user, per month, compared to the hours we are saving on this one process.

I’ve gotten a lot of exposure to the VP-level people at my company who can see that the ROI is there and who are interested in the time-savings potential. For myself personally, showing this initiative and innovation and creativity has earned me more of a positive and trustworthy reputation with the C-suite, which doesn’t hurt either.

How You Can Experiment With AI-Built Bots

Wrapping your head around AI tools can help you solve more complex Customer Success problems and be less reliant on in-house technical resources. 

Since putting the form bot out there, I've seen the wheels turning in people's heads. They’re thinking, How else could we use this? Can we use it for this project where we're rebuilding BI reports for people that are in SQL in a database somewhere? And, yes, it could spit out SQL. It could spit out whatever code you want.

Having ChatGPT is like having a really talented developer on the team. To make them thrive, give them as much context as you can, and they will help you map out whatever you need to build. 

AI sounds intimidating, especially to CS people, but it’s so much easier than they think to get started. You're just prompting with plain language. Just ask your boss to get you $20 just to try it for a month. You can find use cases in that amount of time. It's fun, and it's fast. And if you're curious, like I'm a curious person, then I think it's worth everybody's time. 

We're all under the gun in terms of resource constraints. AI can help us do more with less. Why wouldn't you try to do this?