Artificial intelligence is omnipresent, and we encounter it almost on a daily basis, without us being aware of it. An increasing number of technological developments that we use in our everyday lives are based on AI, in order to effectively support us. Whether we make a chat request on a website or trigger a quick voice search via voice assistant – in both cases, AI is behind it.
By now, there is a vast variety of tools that support marketing and sales departments with artificial intelligence and thus increase their efficiency.
Customer service is one of the areas in which AI is increasingly used to propel success. Generally, users are open to bots operating in customer service (for example, AI-support, provided by Hubspot). Often, they are even preferred over other communication channels like email or telephone, as they’re providing a faster reply. Simple requests like the need for a company’s phone number are easily answered by a bot, without the user having to navigate through the website menu to reach the imprint or contact page. Requests that are more complicated however are preferably discussed directly with an employee.
More and more purchases in the e-commerce sector are made via a chatbot, which has previously provided the customer with personalized recommendations. In order to communicate with us, the small robots use natural language processing – a method for the processing of natural language. Simple requests like the changing of a billing address or questions regarding the payment options as well as other FAQs are answered by information-bots on websites in a quick and uncomplicated manner via a chat window.
Thanks to machine learning, bots are moreover able to present the online buyer with recommendations based on data of other users. This can lead to a tremendous increase in sales.
In order to process customer requests, voice assistants also use natural language processing. By now, we are able to manage our TVs, smartphones, computers and laptops via voice or trigger a voice search respectively. It’s all about jumping on the bandwagon and optimizing one’s content for voice search in order to keep up with the competition on established search engines. In contrast to the interface of a classical search result page, a voice search delivers only a single reply. Consequently, the competition on search engines is immense – small and medium sized companies in particular struggle to keep up with the big players. However, voice search also opens up new possibilities, like improved chances when it comes to regional discoverability.