Author: Gaurav Sharma
AI for business communication.
Never heard of it?
I don’t blame you. Until now, artificial intelligence has majorly been used to streamline manufacturing, customer support, documentation, and logistics. Business communication has largely been a stronghold of humans.
But all that is poised to change now. With AI tools getting more advanced and “human-like” by the day, they are more than ready to handle your internal and external business communication single-handedly.
Don’t believe me? Check out the use cases explained in this post. I’m sure you will be ready to embrace AI for business communication once you know how other businesses are taking advantage of its superhuman capabilities.
4 Ways to Use AI for Business Communication
There are many applications of AI for business communication. Check out the top four below:
1. Chatbots
A great business communication strategy focuses on providing a stellar customer experience (CX).
Why so? Because CX is a priority for 80% of modern consumers, according to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” survey.
Image via Salesforce
AI-powered chatbots can help your business deliver a memorable CX and ensure customer satisfaction. These virtual assistants can be embedded on your website, app, and other touchpoints to provide prompt and personalized service to your customers.
Let’s take a look at how AI chatbots can optimize business communication and CX.
Chatbots Are Efficient and Cost-Effective
AI enables bots to converse with multiple customers simultaneously, thus reducing customer service costs. They can handle mundane, repetitive user requests at scale, without any human intervention. The best part here is that they can respond to their messages instantly too.
Chatbots Are “Almost” Human
Chatbots seem efficient and all, but what if they mess your CX with robotic, inappropriate responses? Such “robots” are designed to catch and assimilate the nuances of human language by virtue of natural language processing (NLP). They can mimic humans and even use humor to pacify hassled customers.
Chatbots Delight Users with Personalized Responses
Powered by AI, chatbots can offer hyper-personalized responses that are tailored to each user’s unique needs and interests. They draw on previous conversations and historical CRM/sales data for each user to gather insights about them. After that, it’s just a matter of joining the dots and giving contextual answers.
That’s the mechanism chatbots use to offer “intelligent” product recommendations to shoppers. It’s no wonder that chatbots are one of the most popular AI ecommerce solutions.
For a better sense of how such a chatbot works in the real world, check out how Bank of America’s chatbot reminds customers about pending bills, overdrafts, etc. making their lives easier.
Image via Bank of America
This way, it streamlines business communication for the bank and cements its customer relationships.
2. Smart Call Centers
According to BrightLocal, 60% of customers who find a business online tend to call them. That means call centers are still vital for business communication.
Image via BrightLocal
No matter what kind of call center you choose to hire (inbound, outbound, or virtual), AI can augment the performance of your call centers.in four distinct ways:
- Data capturing: Virtual call centers use AI-powered VoIP phone services that integrate seamlessly with your CRM systems to fetch user data faster, thus reducing response delay.
- Customer service: After assimilating the above data, AI algorithms help craft personalized responses or transfer tickets to live agents, according to issue severity.
- Forecasting customer support trends: Using predictive analysis, AI tools can decipher the kind of support (manual/live) that can deliver the highest satisfaction.
- Sentiment analysis: AI chatbots can be trained to decipher the emotional state of callers over live customer calls and on a scale – something that wasn’t possible earlier.
In a nutshell, powering your call centers with AI can ensure quick issue resolution, which, in turn, reduces your customer churn and labor costs.
3. Smart Ad Campaigns
If you leverage advertising for business communication, AI can help you maximize its ROI. For instance, Albert, an AI-powered platform has helped Harley-Davidson increase their monthly lead volume by 2930%. Out of all their monthly sales, HD attributes 40% to Albert’s smart ad campaigns.
Image via Albert
Albert crafted personalized ad copy and coupled that with laser-focused ad targeting. That helped the motorcycle brand retarget lost customers and convert them into hot leads. To that end, AI tools have the potential to capture and assimilate millions of data points, which can be used to create accurate user personas for your ad targeting.
You can use AI-based editors to predict ad copy that has a good performance history with your target audience. These tools can go really granular and even optimize minute ad elements like CTA button colors. Moreover, predictive analysis can forecast ad performance and costs by analyzing historical data. They can even pinpoint bidding spots that can get maximum visibility and ROI for your ads.
By leveraging these tools, you can effectively launch your marketing or retargeting campaigns and generate leads and sales.
4. Intelligent Meeting Schedulers
On average, a typical office-goer attends 62 internal and external meetings per month. Meetings are unavoidable for business communication. But that doesn’t negate the fact that a lot of productive work time gets wasted in scheduling meetings. From checking attendee availability to sending meeting updates, everything consumes a lot of time and effort.
AI-powered email marketing tools can help you schedule meetings over emails in seconds. They sync calendars, check attendee availability, and send scheduling updates – all without any human intervention. Plus, they have a near-zero failure or flaw rate.
There are tools like ActiveCampaign that have native integrations with AI-powered scheduling solutions. ActiveCampaign’s x.ai sends pre-meeting materials to attendees, maintains minutes of meetings, and assigns action items too. 
Image via ActiveCampaign
With AI tools scheduling meetings in the background, you can focus on more cognitive tasks and get more out of your workday.
Ready to Leverage AI for Business Communication?
Business communication is the lifeblood of modern businesses. It governs how a business looks in front of its stakeholders – employees, customers, and investors. AI can optimize your business communication on all major outbound touchpoints like chatbots, call centers, ads, and meetings.