As machine learning becomes more prevalent in business, it has the potential to affect a company’s day-to-day interactions with its customers, whether positively or negatively. Many businesses have already invested heavily in machine learning and have found great success. However, new tech can always be intimidating, scary or potentially difficult to implement.
Below, eight leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council attempt to quell some of those fears by discussing the merits of machine learning and how they see it affecting their own daily interactions with customers. These are just a few things machine learning can do to help take your business to the next level.
Young Entrepreneur Council members discuss how machine learning can affect customer interactions.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.1. Help You Understand Your Customers Better
One challenge that businesses always have that will never change or fade away is meeting their customers' real needs, desires and preferences. They are constantly changing. The world is constantly changing, lifestyles are constantly changing and the economy is constantly changing. What customers desired yesterday will be different tomorrow and what they needed several months ago will look very different in a year. Machine learning offers a valuable opportunity to understand your customers better than you ever dreamed possible. You can crunch and analyze data that will help you make better merchandising and marketing decisions. You can find out what they expect from their experience, as well as what they hope to see in the future. - Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
2. Fine-Tune Your Personalization Strategy
We expect to use machine learning to fine-tune our personalization strategy. Consumers like shopping with businesses that know their preferred products and services. The data analysis features offered through machine learning allow entrepreneurs to connect with their customers like never before. As the year goes on, we anticipate seeing positive results from using data to hone our marketing funnels. Understanding what each customer wants means we will have a better chance to turn them into a subscriber or loyal customer. - Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
3. Offer Better Context Backed By Data
Machine learning can provide better context backed by strong data points. Machine learning won't kill jobs or put an end to the customer service process. That said, leveraging a growing database and applying statistical analysis on top can present new contextual opportunities for better decision making, fewer hoops between interactions and a stronger case while discussing sales opportunities, new products or plans, and the applicable scenarios your team should focus on while speaking with customers. In other words, face-to-face or direct conversations will become more valuable thanks to rich data available on demand immediately due to machine learning algorithms. - Mario Peshev, DevriX
4. Automatically Update Information
Machine learning will affect day-to-day interactions with customers by automatically updating its information. This helps companies create more personalized campaigns, content and experiences for consumers. Updating information also helps to fulfill customers' needs and strengthen management. - Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
5. Make Growth Marketing More Effective
Machine learning will make growth marketing or "growth hacking" more effective. Growth marketing relies on carrying out multiple marketing experiments, seeing what works and then leveraging it to grow fast. With machine learning, we should be able to create a variety of messaging tactics and also analyze what's working and why fast. As a result, we then use the campaign or marketing content that's shown good results and push them to get widespread conversions. In this way, machine learning can help us creatively win over more customers faster. - Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
6. Simplify Task Management
Thanks to machine learning, more businesses will be able to simplify task management. Marketers and entrepreneurs waste a lot of time on repetitive tasks that could simply be automated. Machine learning takes over these tasks and gives you more time to focus on other more important projects. As a result, you'll have more time to refine the customer experience and give your audience what they want. Leave it up to machine learning to sift through lots of data and perform analyses that help your brand grow and keep your customers happy. - Jared Atchison, WPForms
7. Help You Offer 24/7 Customer Service
A good thing about machine learning is that we can now offer round-the-clock services to our customers. You can use it to help your customers make an informed decision, suggest products as per their requirements and do so much more with little assistance from your employees. It is a wonderful way of helping your customer feel valued by letting them know that you’re available for them at all times. This can help build stronger relationships and boost your sales too. - Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite
8. Improve Chatbot Performance
Chatbots and how they are developing with the help of AI are one of the ways most businesses will benefit from the rise of AI in the years to come. While we are a long way off from handing over all our customer service work to an AI solution, using these bots as gatekeepers to redirect people to the correct contacts and answer common questions will save businesses money and evoke an air of efficiency. Freeing up your staff members to focus on your customers' more complex problems can be of great use, and offering instant chat windows on your site can be more desirable to customers than having to make a phone call. The interesting question will be, how aware will customers be that they are speaking to AI? - Ismael Wrixen, FE International
