Use Artificial Intelligence to Meet Your Business Needs

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how AI helps marketing teams communicate more effectively with their customers.
• Describe how AI helps prioritize the time of sales teams and streamlines their workflow.
• Describe how AI leads to a better experience for customers seeking service and support.
• Describe how AI can make for a more personalized experience for those buying in stores and online.

Catering to Everyone

As we learned in the first unit, artificial intelligence is really a few ingredients that can be combined to meet your business needs. The reality is that most businesses are going to need more than one recipe; the challenges faced by marketing are very different than those seen by customer support.

Let’s take a look at how different parts of a business can use AI to improve their business outcomes.

Marketing

Do you have lots of potential customers, and need help getting through to them? Marketing is a great place for AI because companies usually have lots of data that can be used to target communications and send relevant messages.

If you’re marketing through email, there are a few questions that can have a huge impact on your campaigns. Will your customers open the email? Will they click through it? Will they act on it? Will they unsubscribe? These are yes or no questions that AI can use to make predictions about future recipients. This means you can send emails to prospects who are likely to open them without unsubscribing. It also means you can know the right channel to use for every customer, such as using push notifications instead of emails. And if you need help drafting the right email, AI can assist you. When you ask Einstein for email assistance, you’ll receive a relevant email template. This allows you to get started fast. 

AI can also help send messages at the right time using Send Time Optimization. Send Time Optimization helps predict the best time to send a communication for the highest response rate, specific to each person. You also want to send the right number of messages so you don’t accidentally annoy the customer to the point that they unsubscribe. With tools like Einstein Engagement Frequency, AI predicts the right number of communications to send without going overboard.

AI also uncovers why questions are answered the way they are. Market insights that might be overlooked by us humans are identified by AI and can be used to craft better communications that resonate with your customers. Just like the sweater that’s popular with twentysomethings and rural older men, what might not be obvious to us is highlighted thanks to AI.

Sales Productivity

AI can elevate your sales game by using historical sales data to predict the best possible sales opportunities. Imagine an inside sales rep who has a list of leads, organized by how likely they’ll convert. That rep is going to spend his time connecting with customers at the top of the list and avoiding cold leads.

An Account Executive (AE) can also benefit from AI. An AE’s time is better spent interacting with customers, not entering data into a CRM. Artificial Intelligence can simplify their lives by picking out relevant information from email exchanges and updating the CRM automatically. For example, an email from the customer about renewing a subscription for another 24 months can automatically update the corresponding opportunity in the CRM. On top of that, AI can tell account executives about additional products to recommend based on buying patterns of similar customers.

Even sales managers benefit from AI. Predictive forecasting can flag opportunities for review if the expected revenue entered by their sales reps doesn’t match closely with predicted revenue based on historical data.

Customer Service

Customer service is another area where AI can help your company. Every day your company receives emails from customers looking for support. In many companies, someone has to read these emails and route them to the right people. They’re using time classifying emails that could be spent actually providing support. AI could help by reading through emails, doing the case classification based on past inquiries, and then automatically routing the emails to the right person. Cases will get into the hands of the right agent faster.

Or imagine a scenario where a new agent is on a call with a customer, taking notes about the issue. AI could scan those notes in real time and recommend relevant articles that are known to solve similar problems. And AI can provide automatic generated responses to help speed up resolution time. This new agent provides highly informed support even on their first day on the job.

Finally, imagine you have a customer who’s more comfortable trying to solve their own issues. Instead of tying up an agent, they can start a conversation with a chatbot. Chatbots use AI to understand what people are asking, and how to respond in a meaningful way. This frees up agents to provide more personal care to customers who really need it.

Retail and Commerce

When shoppers browse online stores, they want an experience that caters directly to them. AI can meet this expectation by providing personalized recommendations for your customers. Historic data tells AI which products are frequently bought together. So if a customer chooses a product, your site can automatically show an offer for a discounted bundle, right on the product page.

If a customer has made a purchase from your store in the past, AI can personalize the entire site to only show items the customer may be interested in. If they use the search box, AI can rearrange the search results so that the items most relevant to the customer show up first in the list.

AI also produces valuable insights for your merchandisers. They can learn which products shoppers most commonly buy together, and use that information to offer a more relevant experience wherever and however you sell. Additionally, AI can discover insights about how your customers are interacting with your store, such as finding the top searches that lead to your site. That allows you to craft your site to cater to just what people are looking for.

Whether you want to boost sales, market to customers more effectively, give your customers outstanding service, or make their shopping experience more personalized, there’s an AI recipe that will help you meet your business needs. Start with some of the tried-and-true solutions, and before you know it you’ll be coming up with your own awesome AI recipes.