What business pain points can AI fix?

On the cusp of digital transformation, small and medium-sized businesses are looking for ways to improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, and anticipate market trends. Artificial intelligence is a promising answer to these challenges. Today, you can harness its potential to identify the pain points and obstacles that are holding your business back. And you can work with AI to solve them more effectively than you could in the past – whether you are an e-commerce company, a SaaS-based tech startup, or even a local bakery. Read on to find out more.

Business pain points - table of contents

Identifying and defining business pain points using AI

Companies are often unaware of the problems that affect their financial performance and customer relationships. Yet, simply identifying pain points is often the first step to eliminating them or improving business processes.

Through collaboration with artificial intelligence, you can identify the causes of frequently occurring errors or inconveniences—pain points, such as delivery delays or inefficient service processes.

The first step to recognize an organization’s pain points is systematic and consistent data collection. Using this data, AI-based tools can analyze past customer interactions and recurring queries to identify trends and anticipate potential issues. Artificial intelligence will pinpoint faulty activity patterns that lead to customer dissatisfaction and may have been missed by humans. Additionally, analyzing post-call comments will enable topic categorization and flagging sentiment analysis results that may indicate customer dissatisfaction.

AI – a new reality for small businesses

Small businesses, looking to save money, are eagerly turning to innovative ways to automate services while providing quality customer service. And implementing AI and tailoring it to the specifics of small businesses is an important step in technological innovation. This is because artificial intelligence makes it possible to perform tasks that previously required a lot of time, while automating these processes, for example, allows for much greater efficiency:

AI chatbots ensure cost savings by reducing the need for multiple service agents,
AI-powered sales analytics is more effective than human judgment and allows for data-driven decision-making,
optimizing internal processes, such as document processing or warehouse management can bring savings through the use of machine learning.

So let’s take a closer look at how artificial intelligence can be implemented in specific areas of a small business.

Pain points of optimizing internal processes

Internal processes are the backbone of every business – their efficiency directly affects a company’s bottom line. If the main pain points of your company are located precisely within the way it operates, it’s worth considering AI assistance.

One of the biggest business pain points is logistics and inventory management. This is true for local micro-businesses that ship directly to customers, as well as for mid-sized companies that ship internationally.

In both cases, solutions using machine learning (ML) will work exceptionally well, for example:

for route optimization, or
analyzing transactional data to enable accurate delivery planning and inventory organization through demand forecasting.

To successfully implement machine learning solutions, it is necessary to rethink the company’s delivery process and make small changes while measuring their effectiveness. For example, automatically generating shipping documents eliminates human error and saves time for employees packing goods. Gradual integration of a series of small automation projects leads to significant process efficiency on a larger scale.

Automating customer service and reducing waiting time

One of the most common pain points for digital native businesses is the problem of customer service continuity. During weekends, after business hours, holidays, or vacations – an online business should be up and running. Customers expect immediate responses and uninterrupted communication, regardless of the chosen channel or holiday season.

That’s why AI chatbots operating non-stop are a solution that will let you differentiate your e-commerce or SaaS business. Apart from continuity, the use of AI chatbots or voicebots enhances the attractiveness of communication. Tailoring content precisely to user preferences improves customer experiences. In the longer term, analyzing customer reactions to interactions with chatbots also provides the opportunity to predict which content will be most appealing to users.

Source: DALL·E 3, prompt: Marta M. Kania (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martamatyldakania/)

Forecasting business trends and adjusting the offer

Your company’s biggest pain point is dynamically adapting your assortment to market changes? In the dynamic world of e-commerce, being able to react instantly to a new trend is sometimes the key to success. The use of data collected by artificial intelligence helps to react much faster to buying preferences. After all, it only takes a minimal change in demand for the algorithm to recognize a trend.

Here, particularly important can be:

analytics of areas of interest coming from the online store’s website,
the number of searches and views on the marketplace, and
data from chatbots regarding which products customers inquired about most frequently and which ones they stopped asking about.

Increasing sales and conversions through intelligent product recommendations Personalized recommendations made by artificial intelligence systems can effectively reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts – a very significant pain point in digital business.

Customers value personalized offers – and that’s what artificial intelligence makes possible. Well-constructed product recommendations increase the likelihood that the consumer will complete the transaction. Machine learning-based recommendation systems uncover hidden relationships between preferences and the decision to purchase a particular product. The algorithms also identify correlations between price changes and sales results, allowing prices to be adjusted to match customer capabilities and expectations.

Source: DALL·E 3, prompt: Marta M. Kania (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martamatyldakania/)

Using AI in marketing and online advertising

Large advertising expenses and low conversion rates? Poorly targeted organic marketing? These are common pain points for small and medium-sized businesses. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the approach to digital marketing by optimizing targeting and marketing messages.

Thanks to AI, companies can target customers more precisely and create more personalized campaigns, which leads to better results at lower costs. For example:

Segmentation and targeting – AI helps identify and segment audiences so you can target ads to those most interested in your product. For example, AI algorithms analyze social media data to better understand user preferences and behavior.
Content optimization – artificial intelligence can analyze which advertising elements are most effective and, based on this, suggest changes to content and graphics to increase audience engagement. This is particularly useful in dynamic industries, where quick adaptation of the message is crucial.
Campaign automation – AI allows companies to create and manage real-time advertising campaigns, adapting to changing market conditions and consumer preferences. This helps businesses adjust their strategies on the fly, leading to better results.

Artificial intelligence can also assist in predicting the outcomes of various marketing strategies, enabling better budget allocation and avoiding ineffective expenditures.

Summary

Implementing artificial intelligence-based tools such as chatbots is an important step toward improving a company’s operational efficiency. Investing in artificial intelligence can yield long-term benefits, such as better understanding customers, increasing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and optimizing operational costs.

That’s why it’s worth being aware of the growing importance of artificial intelligence in today’s business world; not only as a way to save money, but also as a tool that creates entirely new business opportunities to create innovative, effective and future-oriented solutions.

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Author: Robert Whitney
JavaScript expert and instructor who coaches IT departments. His main goal is to up-level team productivity by teaching others how to effectively cooperate while coding.
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