For many small to mid-sized businesses, there is often a strong taste for ambition, but limited ability to achieve it. Due to their small budget, staffing limitations, and lack of technical expertise, SMBs may not be competitive in the market with big retailers.
Automated Machine Learning (autoML) offers them a way to compete against big companies without needing a full team of data scientists. Rather than employing costly staff members to conduct complicated data analyses, SMBs use AI-enabled tools that can review and analyze data, forecast potential results and automate the decision-making process without requiring large amounts of staff or extensive technical training.
The Need for AI Automation in Small Business
All small to mid-sized businesses have the same core challenges: there are too many manual processes, inconsistent processes, and not enough insight into what is working effectively.
AutoML addresses these issues by being a force multiplier for the SMB market. The time to process data is dramatically reduced, and the ability of AutoML to identify patterns of behavior that would otherwise be overlooked allows it to make recommendations that save time and money.
These recommendations result in improved decision-making and clarity of priorities while improving the speed of implementation. Even if the staff of a small to mid-sized business is not trained technically, an automated machine learning platform gives access to advanced predictive models without having to invest heavily in costly technical expertise.
AutoML Provides Personalized Support That Matches Some Large Companies
Customers want the brand they are buying from to understand them. Not long ago, it took a multitude of data teams working on a company’s behalf feeding an engine with data and recommendations for companies to understand their customers but that is no longer required. Small and medium businesses can now leverage AutoML to:
- Understand the preferences of their customers
- Segment their customers more effectively
- Automatically provide recommendations for items and services
- Automatically time follow-ups with actual customer interactions
AutoML makes it possible for small and medium-sized businesses to create the same type of customer-first automated experience that big brands do.
More Efficient Service
Customer support is one of the most resource-intensive components of running a business. AutoML helps to significantly reduce the burden that comes with customer support operations by creating a more sophisticated automated means of providing customer support.
With AutoML-based tools, small and medium-sized businesses can now:
- Prioritize tickets according to urgency
- Analyse the most frequently asked questions and develop better automated self-service capabilities
- Identify customers who are at risk of leaving their service (churning) and create alerts so that customer service personnel can focus on them
- Use chat and email data to better analyze the emotions associated with customer inquiries so that they can respond to the most urgent support inquiries first
The above capabilities allow companies to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on customer interactions that truly require the human touch.
Minimizing Risks When Making Day-to-Day Decisions
When you’re operating a small business, you’re constantly making decisions. For example, what should you have available to sell? How much will you spend on advertising? What area should you focus on developing next? Which customers should you spend time and effort targeting?
Integrate Data Across Multiple Platforms/Systems
Most small business owners manage multiple systems – Point Of Sale systems, website analytics tools, email marketing tools, spreadsheet applications, accounting applications, etc. Unfortunately, many of these systems do not connect automatically, making it difficult for a business owner to understand the overall picture of their company’s performance.
AutoML platforms provide a way for organizations to pull together all of their company data from multiple sources into one central repository. Therefore, instead of having to manually export files or upload them to some other location, small to medium businesses will now have access to unified data that represents the entire company and not only a small part.
This provides a more secure, reliable base for making financial forecasting and business planning decisions. The clearer the trends of the company, the easier it will be for decision-makers to make informed decisions.
Using AutoML Technology to Improve Employee Hiring and Workforce Planning
With small to mid-sized organizations, workforce planning is one of the most challenging aspects of owning and operating the business. With AutoML technology, workforce planning can be more informed than ever. It helps analyze factors such as:
- Peak customer activity
- Seasonal trends in demand
- Costs associated with employing staff
- Process of evaluating employee performance over various time frames
- Workload trends
As a result of using AutoML technology for workforce planning, companies are now able to create better-structured work schedules, ensure that they do not have too many or too few employees, and even predict when they will need to hire staff or train existing employees.
These same AutoML systems also assist in screening potential candidates by evaluating job applications for certain skill-sets and work-patterns that have proven successful over a long period of time, all while maintaining neutrality in decision-making processes and not replacing human judgment. With AutoML technology, workforce planning is truly predictive rather than reactive.
Supporting Financial Planning and Cash Flow Stability
Cash flow is the pulse of every small business. Even one month with unexpected results can put significant financial pressure on an SMB. AutoML can enable long-term financial planning for small businesses by providing better forecasts regarding future revenues, expected expenses, estimated customer lifetime value (CLV), and predictions of seasonal slow periods and/or payment delays.
Business owners now have sufficient lead time to implement any corrective actions that may be necessary , including adjusting spending, finding short-term funding, and/or launching promotional efforts aimed at increasing revenue.
Endnote
Automating the use of machine learning (ML) through AutoML allows SMBs to grow and build with the same agility, efficiency, and effectiveness as larger companies without having to employ many resources or large technical teams. Through AutoML, SMBs are able to easily develop personalized marketing experiences and enhance their customer service and sales performance while gaining data-driven insights that enable effective marketing campaigns.
