Are you thinking of incorporating AI in your small business? You are taking the right step.
Studies have shown that AI can boost business productivity by 40%. And it is anticipated that the global AI market will reach almost $60 billion by 2025.
But how do you start leveraging the power of AI? The right place to start is to dig into your business problem.
Do you face difficulty in understanding your customer‘s needs? Are you getting complaints about poor customer service? Is the workload too much to handle? Are your advertising campaigns going in vain?
All these issues can be solved by leveraging the power of AI in your business. Let’s discuss some crucial points that will help you out while implementing AI.
1. Understand your customers better and improve their experience
Customer experience is crucial if you want your business to succeed. AI can help you to collect customer data, which you can use in understanding your customers better.
For instance, by using the data, you can personalize their shopping experience.
You can make product recommendations based on previous purchases by using their purchase history.
Here’s how Sephora sends personalized emails to their customers for better customer satisfaction.
North Face is another company that uses IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology. They ask their customers where they’ll wear the clothing and what they will be doing. Making use of that information, they make personalized recommendations.
And if you choose Shopify Plus as your platform to sell your products, you can turn complicated tasks into a streamlined experience that your customers will enjoy.
You will find easy to use templates, you can tag and segment customers based on their buying behavior, automate inventory management for low-stock products, track and reward customers based on lifetime spend and more.
2. Lighten employee workload
Automation can help you to work smarter and realize business objectives faster and more efficiently. With the help of AI, you can set up an intelligent digital assistant to help workers do data-oriented tasks.
You can prioritize emails based on urgency, balance workflows, and attach relevant content to emails. It will eliminate the issue of information overload.
Moreover, AI can help you to examine metadata tags and relationships automatically. Thus, you don’t need to manually categorize the content.
And if there are adjustments to be made in your employees’ practices or if you want to engage workers better and decrease high turnover, AI can constantly monitor employee morale by analyzing internal data, such as pulse scores, and employee reviews.
3. Improve marketing and advertising
Artificial intelligence can significantly enhance your advertising efforts. It can help you to control the purchase and sale of advertising in real-time, including ad exchange, third-party network, and advertising products on social platforms.
There are tools that can automatically improve advertising spend and targeting. You can process the amount you spend on ads and targeting data, get results, and learn what actions will increase profit.
For example, the Red Balloon, an e-commerce company, used AI to identify ways to improve spend and targeting that got them a 3,000% return on ad spend.
4. Provide employee training
Digital adoption platform companies that are powered by AI can make employee training easier and more productive. For instance, Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that offers LMS-integrated Microlearning.
It makes the content that you offer to your trainees more engaging and valuable by deeply personalizing it for them. It is designed for interactive learning, and the content can adjust to a user’s needs.
You can support preferred learning styles with auto-generated articles, videos, PDFs, slideshows, and more, thus reducing the time spent on classroom training.
5. Enhance customer service with bots
Bots are being increasingly used by companies to provide customer service, and it is bringing positive results.
AI-powered bots and live chat tools can handle numerous tasks, whether it is troubleshooting or interacting with potential customers in real-time, eliminating the need for human employees.
It can provide 24/7 customer service, which becomes difficult and tiresome when handled by humans.
Usually, customer support teams spend plenty of time researching answers. And customers hate to wait. With the help of AI, you can store answers and identify commonly asked questions. Thus, it provides you with an option of frequent answers that can be inserted automatically based on the content in the ticket.
Not only is it helping the customers, but the workflow also gets reduced. You will be saving a lot of time and money spent on maintaining human customer service teams.
It also helps you boost sales like nothing else!
Of course, the ultimate end of every business is to boost sales. By automating your sales processes and equipping your salespeople to follow up on leads, you can significantly improve sales.
It is said that the adoption of AI by sales teams is anticipated to increase by 139% in the coming three years. And as per Salesforce, automating activities such as email campaigns and sales follow-ups have resulted in a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
So if you are not automating your sales processes, you are missing out on a lot. Plus, the type of customer experience you give will impact your sales.
And US companies are losing over $62 billion yearly because of bad customer service.
By using AI, you can provide personalized service, offer 24/7 support, conduct follow-ups, and thus improve customer service.
Wrapping-Up
AI can be rightly said as the future of business. Companies that don’t implement it are lagging behind. In this modern era where digitalization is evolving at a rapid scale and revolutionizing business, you can give a competitive edge only by adopting the latest technology powered by AI.
Use AI to understand your customers and provide them with a superior experience, cut down your workload, enhance marketing and advertising efforts, provide employee training, use bots for offering 24/7 support to your customers, and boost sales.
What is not there to love about what AI offers? Sure, you will need to put in some investment, but the ROI you get and the efficiency and accuracy it will bring to work is worth the money.
