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How SME Can Benefit from Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

When you think of Artificial intelligence or machine learning you usually think of big companies like Google or Amazon that have successfully incorporated these innovations into their platforms. AI/ML solutions require vast volumes of data, so small companies are often hesitating to integrate AI into their business workflow. But these days, turning your small business into a data-driven company might be easier than you think. Check out these few easy tips on how to kick start AI transition of your small company right now.

AI functionality embedded into CRM platforms

CRM systems are designed to gather information about consumers across different channels (e.g. email, phone, and social media) in order to automate marketing and lead generation. So it creates an integrated environment to manage interactions with current and prospective consumers.

With AI-enabled CRM, small businesses can automatically get more insights from their customer data and make their marketing and sales teams more efficient and consumers more satisfied.

AI can help small businesses analyze consumer sentiments in recorded phone conversations, emails, social media posts, and customer reviews, evaluate customer feedback, and adjust marketing and lead generation activities accordingly. Salespersons of small businesses can get a better understanding of customer intents in inquiries to automatically route leads, personalize marketing campaigns and more.

Marketing as a natural environment for AI

Small and medium companies with the usage of AI marketing solutions can find the best marketing strategy and dramatically reduce their CPC (cost per click). Algorithms used by AI can analyze customer engagement as a result of previously launched marketing campaigns. Automation of regular bids and efficient budget monitoring will also mean saving money on hiring additional marketing and advertising staff.

We all know that dealing with marketing budgets usually requires deep domain expertise, which entails additional and often undesirable costs for small businesses. Fortunately, these days small enterprises can use even modest budgets effectively with AI solutions for marketing. Small businesses can entrust their marketing campaigns to AI-powered platforms that manage marketing operations across multiple channels (e.g Adwords, Facebook, Bing). What any SME manager or owner gets is an ability to analyze advertising performance and to get informed suggestions about the best budget distributions in terms of PPC (pay per click).

Intelligent customer service solutions

Customer service and support are one of the key components of efficient customer retention and satisfaction. However, the quality of customer service might deteriorate when support agents have to perform manual and repetitive tasks instead of focusing on unique support experiences for consumers.

Small businesses can integrate AI software into in-house customer services to the day-to-day operations of support agents. AI solutions can suggest or automate answers or classify messages so they could meet with the right team, freeing up your support agents’ time for dealing with issues which require human engagement. So, by using AI, small businesses can improve internal communication and automate repetitive questions reaching substantial employee and customer satisfaction.

Intelligent solutions

AI-ready tools can easily be incorporated in literally every element of a business workflow that involves data. Leveraging sentiment analysis, classification and prediction algorithms small business can instantly draw useful business insights from any bit of their data.

For example, small companies can use sentiment analysis in their Google Sheets, CSV and Excel data without any coding. It’s easy to integrate, and the platform also enables automatic classification, tagging, and processing of support tickets, and classification of inbound emails and other communications. The system can be also used to analyze product reviews and distill them into useful reports containing practical business insights. All these features will save small business the cost and time needed to review data flowing into their communication channels.

Small businesses would have more results if they kick start their AI strategy sooner rather than later. Instead of hiring additional help, why not use third-party tools with easy-to-use interfaces and efficient machine learning functionality to plug their data and workflow into intelligent platforms. Workflow automation coupled with business intelligence will save small businesses time and money while enabling them to stay competitive in the emerging data-driven economy.