Over the past few months, artificial intelligence (AI) has been omnipresent. It’s a hot discussion topic ranging from AI-driven personalized digital marketing and business communication to cyber security testing.
Especially generative AI, like ChatGPT and Bard, has seen constant publicity.
But caught up in the deluge of AI coverage, it’s difficult to pinpoint how it relates to your business. And that’s how you can actually leverage it for your own purposes.
In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at actionable strategies for AI, specifically, how you can harness the power of AI for your business communications. Here are five ways to use cutting-edge, AI-based tools, streamline your workflows, and make your communications more efficient.
Harness Natural Language Processing
To begin with, consider harnessing natural language processing (NLP). This type of AI model has been trained to recognize and process spoken and written input by actual humans. And to respond in kind.
NLP tools are actually already included in a lot of business communication suites. For instance, if you have a cloud-based business phone service, there’s a good chance that it has an automatic transcription of voice messages or even entire conversations. Some platforms even generate call summaries. That allows anyone looking back at an exchange to grasp the main points without revisiting everything.
Overall, this can save you massive chunks of time. Transcription, especially, is a time-intensive process. With the right tools, you no longer have to foist the tedious task of transcribing meetings or conversations with unlucky team members. Instead, you can rely on AI to document your business communications.
Automate Routine Business Communication Tasks With AI
Similarly, you can save a lot of time by automating routine communication tasks.
For example, some VoIP phone systems and omnichannel communication platforms come with AI routing and assistants. That means calling customers and clients can state their business in their own words. Then, the AI can either handle it directly if it is a routine matter such as scheduling appointments or giving information on shipments. Or it can forward the call to the right available agent.
The bottom line? It reduces unnecessary call forwarding and eliminates frustration for customers, who will no longer have to face endless rounds of “Press 1 for …” menus.
Another excellent way to harness AI to take over routine tasks is conversational chatbots.
Chatbots can communicate with your clients 24/7 at a tiny fraction of the cost of human interactions. But their availability and price point are not their only advantages. A major plus point is also that they can easily handle run-of-the-mill inquiries, such as giving account updates and answering FAQs. This frees up your human agents to handle truly complex issues.
Overall, using AI to automate routine workflows can seriously streamline your communications and increase team productivity and customer satisfaction.
Delegate to AI Assistants
Next up, you can elevate your business communications with AI assistants.
These tools are there to make your team members’ lives easier. Communication assistants take over documentation tasks and ensure all the information they need is always available.
Let’s circle back to the example of omnichannel communication platforms. Many of them offer AI assistants, which become especially useful when leveraged together with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, either native or through integration.
Say one of your agents gets a call from a customer experiencing problems with a product. The AI assistant will automatically pull up the customer’s record from the CRM to put it at the agent’s disposal. Right away, they’ll have all the information on the customer at their fingertips. For instance, they’ll see the date of purchase and whether the caller has contacted customer support before. Consequently, they’ll be able to hit the ground running instead of having the customer explain their entire odyssey from the start.
Similarly, AI assistants can also provide useful prompts during difficult conversations with customers. As the assistant transcribes and analyzes the interaction in real-time, it can spot rising tension through sentiment analysis. Then, it can offer suggestions for conversation strategies to the team member in charge, helping them de-escalate and resolve the situation.
Leverage Generative AI for Creative Workflows
Another useful way in which you can integrate AI into business communications is by leveraging generative AI for workflows that require creative input.
Say you need to populate your monthly newsletter. Or you need to write a Twitter thread about the results of your latest niche study. Or, say you want to create an Instagram Story about your latest product.
Generative AIs such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney can speed these processes up significantly.
While you don’t want to rely on these tools exclusively, they can provide a solid basis to jump-start your creative workflows. In the stressful world of business communications, drawing inspiration from your back pocket can be invaluable.
Gain In-Depth Insights From AI Analytics
Finally, one way in which you can use AI to level up your business communications is through analytics. AI excels at handling massive amounts of data and uncovering trends and correlations that humans could never pinpoint.
That means that AI analytics tools can provide rich, in-depth insights into your customers’ behavior and your agents’ performance.
Using AI, you can fine-tune personalized digital marketing and gain and provide training to your team members that is tailored to their strengths and weaknesses in customer interactions. Plus, you can optimize your resource use and cut back on your overall communications budget.
Final Thoughts on AI for Business Communications
Going forward, AI will play a core role in business communications.
By adopting the strategies above now, you can keep up with the most important trends and stay ahead of the curve.
Take your time to assess which AI tools you currently have at your disposal and which ones you could feasibly add and integrate into your workflows. While this may take some time and resources, it is ultimately well worth it in terms of boosting your communications.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Manuel Guillén Vega; Pexels; Thank you!
