Wouldn’t it be nice if mundane tasks like emails to employees or data entry were done automatically? AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is the buzzword of the moment, and with good reason. It’s shaping the future of how businesses --no matter the size-- can develop more meaningful interactions with their customers.
While the idea of using AI is foreign to many, it’s not as sci-fi as it sounds. With the implementation of automation, a form of AI, the possibilities and benefits it can provide to you as a business owner will likely prove their worth. For small businesses, it’s best to start small, as opposed to tackling everything at once.
If you’re open to it, AI can best your new best friend. Below are three ways small businesses can take advantage of AI to build a better business.
Uncover Secrets in Data
AI can be instrumental when it comes to data analysis. As technology evolves, AI components can pull insights out of data, saving business owners time and money, as opposed to having to go through a manual process. The data then can be organized into reports that then generate insights about your customers.
Through reporting analytics, customer behavior and business performance is revealed. In essence, AI is predictive technology that builds stronger existing customer relationships and aids in the generation of new ones. By understanding what your customer wants and what they value, you’re getting ahead of the game and can then, position your brand accordingly.
For example, Revel has real-time reporting through the Intelligent Reporting suite that gathers data from transactions and gives business owners a glimpse into the current state of their business. This insight displays aspects like sales summaries, hourly sales, and product mixes to determine which products are selling more than others.
Use Predictive Technology to Your Advantage
As mentioned above, the ability to predict customer behavior and form a selling strategy around that is what will ultimately set your apart from your competitors.
This does not only have to do with customers, it can also be applied to daily operations in your business. For example, if you’re the owner of a coffee shop and there is an issue with the temperature of the freezer, wouldn’t you want the ability to identify the initial problem before it ends up costing you several hundred dollars in wasted ingredients?
AI has the ability to identify problems and solve them, saving you the stress of having to worry about it, so that you can concentrate on what’s most important.
Revel introduced RevelGuard last year, a hardware device that monitors the network health and builds alerts. It’s installed directly on the POS and remains unobtrusive to business and customer data, all the while collecting information and automatically notifying Revel support of a problem, so they can quickly complete diagnostic work and fix it.
Make Better Business Decisions
Data and reports draw conclusions as we’ve mentioned, but it’s what you do with that knowledge that determines the true impact of AI.
Imagine the power you take back as a small business owner, once you've got the intel on what resonates most with your customers. Not only are you driving success for your business, but you’re also influencing the type of experience your customers have.
A shopping environment becomes much more attractive to customers when they feel valued, heard, and empowered.
It can be scary to imagine manual processes that were human jobs now being done by machines, but if the end result is saving time and cost, then it’s moving in the right direction.
Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of enterprise content management platform, Box, says it best, “AI can seem dystopian because it’s easier to describe existing jobs disappearing than to imagine industries that never existed appearing.”
AI is not about Will Smith and Haley Joel Osment fighting robots, or about streamlining a business (while that’s part of it), it’s about building a successful, future proof business.
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