Last Updated on April 22, 2021 by Guest
Artificial Intelligence is a growing technology among the top digital innovations. Although so many people think that this technology is a futuristic approach, it is actionable in real-time. You do not have to be a multi-billion dollar business investing in and employing AI in your ventures. Small businesses, including yours, can benefit from such technology to reach more potential clients and grow.
While marketing, operations, and inventory stocking make the core of a business, you cannot ignore the space for innovation to promote growth. Small businesses, especially, are always on the run trying to find new ways to get to the top in their industries – not only by customer base but also by providing satisfactory services. One can consider limited company formation packages while setting up a new business. This article describes five of the methods that AI is actively transforming businesses.
1. Improved Customer Service
Customers come as a priority in business. Whatever their concern, you need to provide solutions and help them to make the right decisions. After-sales service is essential in helping customers to use the products you are selling. But in most cases, where customers need answers, most businesses find it difficult to keep up with the rate at which questions stream in.
Taking, for instance, where customers need to raise tickets or send an email, you realize that it becomes an inconvenience when they have to wait for one attendant to respond to each ticket individually. Sometimes, the customer care representative ignores some messages they deem “not so important” or do not tend to lead to immediate sales.
Such inconveniences cause the customers to distrust a brand and prefer a competitor. It is ideal to understand that customer service is the present-day form of marketing to grow your business. It is, therefore, inevitable to find ways to harness the power of technology to ensure that you serve customers according to their needs at any hour.
With artificial intelligence, computer programs (chatbots) can read the context in customer questions and provide feedback that can help them find solutions or make decisions. In this way, your business can deliver customer service responses in real-time to many customers without finding it an overwhelming task.
Chatbots are still in development to ensure that they deliver the expected solutions to customers on websites. They are more efficient and cost-effective to set up than hiring tens or hundreds of customer care agents to answer customer questions.
Another advantage is that they can be implemented on any platform, including social media. However, you need to be keen when configuring the bot to ensure that it stays consistent and provides realistic answers so that customers can understand the flow and get the directions they need.
2. Conversion of Customer Data into Actionable Insights
Are you collecting customer data? Every business needs a CRM to put their interactions with customers at a central place. You do not want to be caught off guard when a customer calls following up on their conversation, order, or requesting information about a product they bought from you. CRM solutions help you to easily track down customers and what they have been up to in your business.
However, although there is too much data in your database, it is not easy to use it to scale up your business. Running through raw data in your database to find specific information has never been easier, especially when working with a huge list of customers and subscribers. You will need more than enough time to find the information you need for your promotions and understand your customers.
If you manage to extract some data from your database, you are most likely going to have a few errors here and there. Working with erroneous information is disastrous for your business. But what else can you do? Employ AI to extract data and present it in usable forms.
Because of its ability to work with huge databases, AI solves your time when digging for specific information. It also makes it easy to find the best customers fit for a particular promotion through customer trends. You do not want to spend more on advertising products to customers who are less likely interested in your offers.
AI also ensures that the data is accurate to include relevant information you collect from your Magento PWA into your database. You can be sure that AI can detect duplicates so that you can merge customer profiles and eliminate irrelevant information to keep your database clean and light enough to work with faster.
3. AI Facilitates the Hiring Process
Every business wants to work with the best talents in the industry. Whether you are hiring through a job portal or you advertise to receive the applications directly, you will have lots of resumes to go through to find the ideal candidates for your job openings. Running through the resumes will take significant time, and, sometimes, you may never finish all of them.
Time limitation has led to so many businesses hiring the wrong candidates. Through their rush, companies forget the importance of evaluating the candidate information and background before deciding who they should bring on board. Wrong candidates ruin your business’s progress and waste both time and resources – including money and raw materials.
As an established business, you may want to hire several candidates for various positions. Finding a candidate for each position is even more tedious than employing one worker. Therefore, you must ensure that you hire the perfect match so that you can avoid repeating the process over and over and, thereby, hindering progress.
With artificial intelligence, it is possible to hire the right candidate for the right position to guarantee business growth. Sampling through the received resumes, AI can not only filter candidates by their qualifications and experience but also collect data from social networks to compare it with your internal algorithm to narrow down the selections.
I know that startups and small businesses would think that this idea is overkill. However, it is still worth investing in artificial intelligence to find workers that can help you to grow. While you need a few workers and possibly a few applications, it is important to use AI’s ability to save time and read through data to highlight the candidate’s personality.
4. Business Security
It is common knowledge about how hacking and fraud have caused huge harm to businesses. Most hackers target data. When a hacker gains access to a customer’s account, for example, on an eCommerce site, CRM, or computer, they can use the same to exploit their other services or steal their money. Most hacking techniques involve phishing and brute-forcing.
While there is little that businesses can do to prevent phishing except sending their customers warnings about the website address they should use to sign in, it is possible to prevent other kinds of hacking on their systems. For instance, we know and maybe have used captcha to deter bots from accessing services even with the correct passwords.
Some systems can also prevent sign-in attempts from the first step. This, however, can hinder a genuine customer from accessing their accounts and, involuntarily, allow spammers to get into the system. Preventing access to various IPs alone is not sufficient in securing your system. You need an advanced method that can understand how a hacker behaves to allow access to customers.
With artificial intelligence, the same way it can monitor customer actions and responses to determine what they need, your system can also detect fake customers who only need access to vital information on your server. It is easier for AI to determine when the system is under attack and close its connection from the offending party.
5. Smart Marketing Techniques
Customer data has a lot to do with the way businesses operate, and that is why data is so expensive. For the same reason, most hackers try to steal customer data from so many sources to use it for spamming while trying to make sales. But how can you, after AI has analyzed customer data, transform your marketing goals and methodology?
Let us begin with production. Before launching a new product, you want to be sure how your customers will react to it. The data across various sources and trends can help you determine what people are looking for in the market. AI can help you find the perfect combination of features, value, and cost to improve sales and conversions.
Advertising is another way to make sure that your business performs at its best, regardless of your product or business industry. Ad placement, for example, matters a lot when advertising on various social networks. AI can read the performance of ads on various placements, ad types, placement time, and budgets in the relevant field to determine the best way to make the highest conversions from your ads.
In Summary
Every business is trying hard, working tirelessly around the clock, to find the best way to grow. Although technology has been advancing through the decades, not so many people have embraced the power of digital innovations to grow their businesses. As a new business, you may be wondering what you can do to make your business perform better than your competitors already established in the market. You should not worry because artificial intelligence, although still growing, is here to transform how we trade.