Why Ignoring AI Will Cost You Time and Sales

From customer service to warehouse management, artificial intelligence has pervaded all aspects of our lives. It’s helping us solve basic as well as complex problems. Businesses are investing in AI so much it is now a major reason for their successes. But it is not only large enterprises that should embrace machine learning. When tailored to your individual situation, AI can help you achieve more sales while saving you time and effort. Here’s how:

Instant Messaging

Perhaps, the most basic form of artificial intelligence application is the chatbot integration. Chatbots are the widgets on company websites that give automatic responses to visitor questions. Answers are programmed to reply to generic questions and to lead visitors to key resources available on the website. These bots are cheap and easy to deploy but have tremendous implications for your business. Chatbots answer the commonest questions that a business faces and keeps your customers engaged even when your personnel are not available. This constant interaction builds a solid relationship with your clients and helps create the right environment for future sales. You wouldn’t need to station staff on a 24/7 rotation just to answer questions about your restaurant’s recipes. But a potential client who has to wait hours to receive an answer to this simple question might never return.

Discover Upselling Opportunities

In the real world, McDonalds staff encourage you to buy more. “Do you want a soda to go with it?” , a waiter may ask. Machine learning can help you too recommend more products to your clients 24/7. When you nurture a client, you do so with the intention of being able to sell more products to them. You do this by understanding their problems and proffering solutions. With artificial intelligence, you are able to do so easily and more conveniently too. The important thing for your business is that information doesn’t need to come directly from your customers. Information from individuals with similar characteristics will be invaluable when you employ artificial intelligence in your business. Uber is using past data to put their drivers in prime locations to reduce their waiting period. For a company in the business of selling products, being able to predict your customers’ future actions puts you in a position to serve them better. With deep learning, you can come very close to doing exactly that.

Better Decision-Making

Employing machine-learning tools helps businesses make more informed decisions. In Nigeria, AI is helping risk analysts at Lidya assess risk exposure of potential credit clients. Left to human analysts, many businesses already accessing loans would not be eligible. By leveraging artificial intelligence, however, Lidya is generating more business. Node, for example, helps you decide which potential customer will purchase your product. It even suggests what words to say, when to say them, and how to say them, in order to increase your chance of closing more deals. Both these real life examples show how you can use artificial intelligence to make better judgement about sales and marketing. The same applies to forecasting and predicting future sales patterns in your business or the industry at large. A firm grasp of this information helps you better position your business to take advantage of situations as and when they arrive.

Saves You Time

Customer Relationship Management allows you to cut down the time you spend in maintaining relationships with your most important clients. The system lets you see within a moment all the key decisions your potential clients have taken regarding your product. By reducing the time it takes to undertake these normally cumbersome procedures, artificial intelligence is freeing up man hours for other productive activities. You can do more complex competitor analysis using a simple tool like Facebook Insights. From crawling the internet for the best keyword to help your product rank on search engine results pages to creating a buyer persona, machine learning does in a few clicks what many Microsoft Excel formulae will do.

Better Salespeople

There is a lot of fear regarding AI’s role in our lives. Many worry large scale automation could lead to governments resorting to basic income to take care of citizens while machines take up every facet of our working lives. However, artificial intelligence is capable of making us better. Rather than kicking us out of jobs, machine learning can help us improve in our skill sets to become better at what we do. E-learning platforms will be better equipped to track our progress and suggest better ways of learning. Also, while robots take care of our mundane and routine jobs, your salespeople will become free to take up positions that require more nuance. The result is more sales and higher revenues in a fraction of the time.