Originally published on timesbusinessidea.com
With technology constantly evolving and big businesses leveraging cutting-edge innovations every day, maintaining any and every advantage available is more critical than ever for small businesses. As the world migrates to the online realm, small businesses must consider using AI to remain competitive. In this article, Daniel Calugar looks at the several advantages available to small businesses that AI can offer.
Increase Conversions
Sales are the core of any business, and the sustained growth of those sales is critical to any lasting venture. Companies use CRMs or customer relationship management systems to better target and fulfill their customers’ needs and increase conversions efficiently. A CRM provides insight into how a customer interacts with your business, allowing businesses to understand their customers better.
In doing so, businesses can identify areas where they can streamline operations, improve products, market more precisely, and strengthen customer support. Following this, a company using a CRM will have a much easier time creating brand loyalty and long, fruitful relationships with their customers.
Automate Customer Service
Not every business is large enough to support a dedicated team of customer support agents 24/7, and yet, customers need support 24/7. A customer can visit a business’s website with an issue and get relevant info from quality chatbot software.
A chatbot can deliver that knowledge and potentially resolve issues without the customer needing to speak with a human and tie up resources. Some chatbots can even create customer service tasks like returns or escalations without needing an initial phone call from the customer to report the issue.
Increase Productivity
Everyday administrative tasks like paperwork, reordering stock, processing orders, and bookkeeping functions can keep the pace slow at small businesses. The productivity lost to context switching, especially when a company has a small staff, poses an enormous, unquantifiable cost that can be easily avoided.
Software that automates such tasks keeps productivity high by alerting the right people at the right time, automatically filling out forms, and handling data entry tasks that would slow down any team.
Find the Right People, Faster
The time and effort needed to find new employees can be intimidating. Creating job listings, reading resumes and cover letters, running interviews and follow-up interviews, onboarding—it all takes time. For a small business, time and human resources are certainly not luxuries. AI technologies can read through submitted documents for relevant keywords and help hiring managers get in touch with qualified candidates more quickly.
By using this information, AI can effectively screen candidates. Hence, only the best-fitting candidates will remain for your approval, shrinking a potentially massive pool of applicants to just the cream of the crop. Further, AI hiring technology can prove helpful to the candidate and remove any harmful biases from the equation related to age, race, and gender.