The various applications of artificial intelligence we’ve seen so far are just the tip of the Iceberg. Many businesses are finding new and innovative ways to use it to optimize their operations for higher efficiency and scalability.
With AI, small businesses can improve their products/services, automate processes, and be proactive in using customer data.
Let’s take a look at some ways you can leverage the power of AI for your small business.
Top 3 Applications of AI for Small Businesses
1. Marketing
Where there is a customer, there is marketing. While every small to mid-scale business is upgrading its marketing strategies and budget, you, as a small-business owner, need to invest in the modern approaches to growing your brand.
Modern marketing techniques such as influencer marketing can be supported by AI and ML to help reduce their cost quite significantly. Here are some ways AI can be used in marketing:
Email Personalization
Email personalization can help improve open and click-through rates. AI-powered email marketing tools can utilize past customer behavior to create more engaging content. Email marketers can use AI to personalize email subject lines, call-to-actions product recommendations, and even to set up drip campaigns.
Product Pricing
AI-powered dynamic pricing is the latest trend in marketing. Marketers can use customer and demand data and inventory discrepancy to determine the individual value proposition a product/service offers. Based on these insights they can then decide on the prices. A very common example of this is Uber’s “surge pricing.”
2. Logistics and Supply Chain
Logistics and supply chain are among the early adopters of artificial intelligence. Small businesses dealing with such operations can use AI-powered tools to optimize them.
The reason why AI is thriving even in small-scale logistic functions is that logistics deals with a lot of data every day, which includes both structured and unstructured data. To manage all this data, businesses need to employ people, which can cost a lot. AI-powered logistics integrated with CRM solutions reduce the need for human resources.
The following are the benefits of AI in the logistics and supply chain operations for small businesses:
- Reduces operational costs
- Makes processes more innovative and agile
- Improves customer service by facilitating constant communication
- Enables intelligent warehouse management by infusing transparency
- Facilitates real-time carrier selection and warehousing
3. Customer Service
The ultimate goal of any customer service department is to address customer concerns on time. While assigning humans for every customer query can result in significant customer service costs, small businesses have started to leverage NLP-powered chatbots to streamline the customer experience.
NLP stands for natural language processing, the technology behind audio to text transcription, and robotic process automation. These are some ways small businesses can improve their customer service via AI:
Utilizing Customer Data for Service Personalization
Personalization should be at the core of your customer service. A chatbot can’t improve customer service if it isn’t supplied with customer data. Powered by AI, these software algorithms are capable of fetching the most relevant information about a customer instantly.
Humanize Customer Service Experience
A chatbot can mimic human behavior and provide your customers with a realistic customer service experience without the need for supervision.
End-to-End Customer Support
Your customer service team cannot be available 24/7, and if they happened to be, it would cost you fortunes. On the other hand, chatbots are a cost-effective solution if implemented the right way. Hence, make sure your chatbots are empowered to provide end-to-end customer support.
Wrapping Up
Artificial intelligence is a gamechanger for small businesses all around the world. It can give them a massive advantage over their competition.
The three areas of operations for small businesses we’ve discussed in this article are the ones that are already leveraging the power of computer intelligence. As AI gets more and more democratized, we will see more intelligent applications of it for small businesses.
