Business Tips series aimed at helping sales operations.
You can get an edge on your competition with AI.
AI is making great strides and businesses would be wise to take advantage of its capabilities. Businesses owners can use AI in many ways, including marketing, operations, and customer service. The possibilities are endless and the benefits are undeniable. With AI’s rapid growth, there’s no better time than now to start using it in your business. Don’t miss out on this exciting technology!
You may not be aware of this, but AI has matured a great deal in the past few years. It is now affordable and easy to deploy, making it a valuable asset for businesses of all sizes.
There are many ways that AI can help your business grow and improve efficiency. For example, AI can intelligently find related data or be used for forecasting future trends.
One key area where AI can be extremely helpful is in customer service. In fact, many companies are already taking advantage of AI’s ability to provide accurate responses to queries.
Another great use for AI is in content creation – the ability to write a few words and have AI generate a flow of information for a Blog or proposal is incredibly helpful.
AI for better Customer Service and Efficiency?
Here are just some of the ways AI will improve your business operations.
1. Improve efficiency by automating tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming.
2. Gain an edge on the competition with insights and analytics that are only possible with AI.
3. Increase productivity by freeing up staff to work on more important tasks.
4. Make better decisions based on data-driven insights instead of gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.
At the core of AI is the ability to sift through vast volumes of data and see the logical connections that relate to the task you have set. We use this everyday with web search and online maps.
Applying it purposefully in your business requires a conscious focus to find where you may be using it incidentally vs a focused approach to maximise the benefit.
One of my areas of interest is where we can go with creation of video. We read it all the time that video is preferred for simple instruction. We can now quite inexpensively use AI to create the words for a podcast but then use these words to generate the podcast in your OWN personal voice. You can then take that voice and have animated video of your own face presenting this material – this is getting very reachable by most as the capability increases, while the price becomes more affordable.
Below are a few other practical areas.
Some Examples of AI
The examples below are all areas we have leveraged and would be happy to expand on further. We hope this gives you some insight into just where we are seeing AI regularly.
Chat Bots
Appearing more and more as the preferred way to deliver customer service. The one big tip most are getting across is the need to have an opportunity to move from a Bot to a Human, something most are also implementing.
So, if we need a a “Human”, then why a bot? The bot will allow a good percentage of general or standard questions to be answered or at the very least direct the customer to the correct area.
AI in a chatbot takes advantage of natural language processing (NLP) along with Machine Learning to understand data and utilise algorithms.
Although there are other more sophisticated options, my favourite here is SalesIQ from Zoho with its Chat and Visitor Tracking – the winner being the ability to integrate this back into your CRM, WhatsApp and many others.
Writing Content
My favourite here is jasper.ai, this platform allows you to enter in a handful of words and generate paragraphs of highly relevant content with accurate grammar. This is shifting the ability to write well to being an expert at leveraging an AI platform for writing.
AI Conversational Assistant
Use natural language to ask for a report – “give me gross sales for Q1 in my region”. This provides a context intelligence. What is even better is when it is used across multiple product areas to search for anything related to your search. A really great example of this is Zia from Zoho as built into their CRM.
AI in Monitoring
This is probably the first place I had a whole lot to do with AI and now see it deployed regularly and in a number of areas. One of the most popular is moving from a static threshold to using Machine Learning to understand the changes in behaviour and alter the threshold to suit. ie: If it learns that at 4PM on a Friday when you run reports CPU and RAM always peak, you would prefer to not be alerted as this is “normal”.
The other area becoming more and more popular is with Forecasting. Especially in the world we live in now with Cloud computing where costs can get out of hand, you need a good handle on what is coming up. This is often much more involved than taking a straight line. AI via ML is providing a much more accurate picture. If you are interested in this area, drop us a line and we can discuss further.
Conclusion:
There are many areas where we see AI being used and we need to be careful on how it is used. If we assume it can all be automated, it is likely to fail. The key is to remove as much “human” handling as you can while ensuring when Customer Service is involved, that customers don’t feel like they cannot chat to a human. This delivers efficiency while improving customer service.
What is surprising is that many clients we deal with already have AI / ML built into their products and have not explored how to take advantage of it – have a look at what benefit you can get from a small amount of effort..