For small- to medium-sized business (SMB) owners, monitoring every aspect of their business — from customer opinions to employee productivity to the overall financial health of the organization — can feel like a full-time occupation.
AI monitoring tools can help streamline these processes by providing real-time insights from an aggregate dataset. SMB owners can then use those data insights to stay competitive, make informed decisions for growth, and implement changes to improve the customer experience.
[Read more: Ready. Set. Scale. How Small Business Can Leverage AI]
Customer sentiment
With the many ways in which customers can interact with your brand, it's essential to make those experiences as smooth and pleasant as possible. Business owners can use sentiment analysis tools to understand their overall brand sentiment and how it compares to that of their competitors.
Sentiment analysis converts human language into a format that allows artificial intelligence (AI) programs to interpret and categorize the text as positive, negative, or neutral based on word use. Brand perception monitoring and social media conversation analysis across platforms are some of the most common applications of sentiment analysis.
Security
AI security tools use machine learning and big data processing to help automate cybersecurity protocols, which include the following:
- Detecting lurking threats, such as identifying malware attacks; securing enterprise networks; as well as providing other security monitoring capabilities.
- Assessing and managing threat vulnerabilities and automating preventive measures to defend an organization from data breaches.
- Monitoring your brand’s external platforms, such as social media channels and collaboration tools, to protect against possible threats to a business’s brand, employees, and digital assets.
Cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, becoming more sophisticated and challenging to detect. SMBs can leverage AI security monitoring tools to streamline their manual processes and benefit from enhanced digital risk protection advancements.
AI can help SMB owners continue to adapt ... with tools that monitor and help manage their employees’ performance effectively, wherever they are.
Social media
Consistency is key to implementing a successful social media marketing strategy. SMBs must continuously create and share high-quality content across their social channels to remain top of mind to new and existing customers.
For SMB owners, creating and implementing a social media marketing strategy — which entails understanding their target audience's social media and content-consuming habits and from there, creating a content creation and distribution schedule and customer engagement plan — can be overwhelming.
Enter AI social media management software. AI tools can help businesses automate more straightforward processes, like scheduling and publishing posts, and aid in creative tasks, like content development. AI-powered social media monitoring tools also offer analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing users to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Accounting
According to a Mordor Intelligence study, the AI accounting market is projected to grow from an estimated $1.56 billion in 2024 to $6.62 billion by 2029.
By investing in AI accounting tools, which aim to minimize human error and enhance productivity and efficiency, SMB owners can more easily monitor the financial health of their operation and manage many accounting tasks, such as forecasting, budgeting, billing, invoicing, and expense and vendor management.
Because many AI tools are designed to integrate with existing systems to provide their insights, any potential AI accounting tool you use should seamlessly integrate with the accounting software your business currently uses. Doing so will allow SMB owners to further streamline their processes.
[Read more: 8 AI Financial Planning Tools for Small Businesses]
Customer support
SMB owners can also invest in AI tools to monitor customer satisfaction and provide customers with a smooth, personalized experience. AI-powered tools leverage technologies like natural language processing to understand customer intent and offer appropriate support options.
Common features of AI customer support software include:
- Chatbots and email bots.
- An AI-powered knowledge base and AI-powered insights and reporting.
- Intelligent customer routing and triage.
- Intent, sentiment, and language detection.
- Agent assistance.
Leveraged correctly, AI can significantly improve the customer support process, both for users and support agents. According to research from Tidio, AI customer support tools can successfully automate approximately 70% of customer requests, freeing up human agents to resolve more complex cases.
[Read more: 8 AI Tools for Better Customer Service]
Employee productivity
The pandemic changed how businesses operate and how employees work, leading to thousands of employees working remotely almost overnight. AI can help SMB owners continue to adapt to this lasting shift with tools that monitor and help manage their employees' performance effectively, wherever they are.
Thanks to AI's machine-learning capabilities, productivity management tools can give SMB owners a deeper understanding of how their employees allocate their time during work hours. By analzying how and on which projects a workforce is spending its time, AI can pinpoint inefficiencies and generate actionable insights that are then used to implement process improvements, thereby enhancing an organization's overall productivity.
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