In today's fast-paced world, businesses are increasingly recognizing the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) in driving innovation and growth. AI, a branch of computer science that enables machines to exhibit human-like intelligence, holds immense potential for businesses.
In its simplest form, AI can enable faster problem-solving. It is a branch of computer science that develops machine systems capable of demonstrating behaviors linked to human intelligence. Today, businesses are seeing a great deal of coverage surrounding AI, but just how important can it be for businesses? In this article, we will explore why AI is crucial for businesses and how it can provide numerous advantages.
Leveraging AI-powered automation
AI automation can provide smaller companies with the freedom to not only better manage, but also accelerate business growth and leverage cost saving benefits at the same time. Businesses are leveraging AI to introduce remote or virtual call centres and receptionists to help assist with incoming call loads. We are seeing virtual agents replacing human agents in some instances along the customer and sales journey. Intelligent systems can help employees better serve customers, drawing on data call analytics, which are helping agents improve how they deal with customers. AI systems can offer a steer on the most relevant actions to follow, to ensure that the discussion with the customer progresses further, during the purchase cycle for instance.
Speech recognition AI
Speech recognition is the capability which enables a program to process human speech into a written format. Speech recognition is most often offered through VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone telecommunication features. The benefits of speech recognition lie around how it can be a key driver of revenue growth and efficiency while streamlining and reducing traditional or legacy business processes. Speech recognition AI can not only allow you to listen to call recordings and see their text transcription, but also provide you with the visibility of call analytics data for further internal business processing, analysis and improvements. You can build employer training and development plans off the back of this collected data to improve sales and customer service call handling performance.
AI in sales & marketing
Analyzing customer journey data will provide you with the ability to build out comprehensive customer profiles. AI helps discover which segments of customers have the highest rates of conversion and engagement. This will help you reshape your customer buyer personas with this information allowing you to better target a niche audience that other companies aren't. Analyzing marketing analytics alongside call analytics can improve your lead engagement levels and qualification process as it gives the sales team more opportunities and more selling time as well as reduces office operation running costs. Call insights can ensure sales teams focus on high demand product areas, which will improve Return on Investment (ROI) efforts. Businesses are utilsing the advancement in AI to supercharge their online marketing efforts. Online search providers, retailers and other businesses with an online presence, use intelligent systems to understand users, their buying cycle and behaviour patterns. AI applications can follow the end to end journey from source. This allows marketers to better target and place advertisements for the specific products. Through monitoring click through rates marketers can select products for advertising that appear to be most popular and post the advert at the right time of day, due to the AI empowered, click through, customer journey knowledge. AI marketing applications assist businesses to deliver targeted marketing in the real world.
Advantages of AI for business
By adopting AI, you can automate, forecast and generate deeper insights that help you make improved decisions. These insights will allow you to unlock new strategies and will better optimize your sales and marketing efforts. AI solutions are being used to forecast the performance of marketing channels and find anomalies to improve return on investment of marketing and media spend. AI is capable of identifying opportunities much faster than humans can and so will speed up your decision-making process. Businesses are finding that faster, more targeted decision making is accelerating the achievement of performance goals.
AI can provide customized experiences for your customers
Today, customers are demanding personalized experiences. AI can help achieve this. You can customize content on your website or advertising boards and provide product recommendations based on user behavior and predictions. Businesses should first use AI to predict what products customers would be interested in based on their previous purchases and where they might drop off in the sales funnel. Some companies may implement changes informed by AI, such as shortening contact forms and changing the call voice menu options to inspire purchasing decisions. AI software can optimize search marketing campaigns and channels by helping you target your audience. Sales teams can use it to find the warmest sales leads and make pipeline predictions.
AI applications such as speech recognition analytics allows managers to assess how productive their team’s really are. If more training is required then this can be identified quickly and actioned. This empowers team’s to develop their skills, and in turn, can increase the probability of sales success.This allows business team’s to focus on meaningful work and boost productivity. AI is capable of handling many small tasks, such as auto-voice respondents to field calls, reviewing website analytics and fixing bugs. AI assisted tools can ensure the workforce can focus on more meaningful activities and be more efficient. There is evidence proving that this type of AI automation is allowing for more time to be spent on nurturing client relationships, developing targeted marketing strategies and implementing wider more effective ROI processes.
Is AI needed in every business?
Scaling artificial intelligence can create a massive competitive advantage, but it’s not enough to invest in cutting edge technologies and algorithms. It's important to remember that as businesses find ways to use AI for competitive advantage, they are coming to terms with challenges too. These challenges will vary but can include AI bias and certain regulation around the use of AI. Fundamentally, financial gains can be elusive if the talent and infrastructure for delivery AI are not in place. Companies of all sizes who wish to leverage AI tools and processes, need to rewire decision making and operations to extract value and invest in human capabilities to ensure applied tools stick. Companies need to invest in people and implement new ways of working processes, to maximize the potential momentum and business acceleration you can gain from artificial intelligence.
In conclusion, the advantages of leveraging AI-powered automation, such as remote call centers and virtual agents, which can enhance customer service and improve efficiency. It also stands out the role of speech recognition AI in streamlining business processes and improving sales and customer service performance. Furthermore, it explores the use of AI in sales and marketing, enabling businesses to analyze customer journey data, target niche audiences, and optimize marketing campaigns. The advantages of AI for businesses include automation, forecasting, generating deeper insights, and providing customized experiences for customers. However, there are also acknowledged challenges and considerations businesses must address, such as AI bias, regulation, talent acquisition, and infrastructure development, to effectively leverage AI tools and processes and maximize their potential benefits.
About author
Dmytro Tokar is the London-based co-founder of Zadarma. He is an expert in bringing new services to the telecom & IT market. He has been helping businesses take advantage of automated technologies for about two decades.
