These days, almost all companies are exploring how artificial intelligence can impact and improve their processes. For smaller companies aiming to stand out, leveraging AI offers unique opportunities to simplify and enhance customer interactions, share compelling messaging, drive personalization, and more, all combining to deliver a better customer experience.
From allowing companies to provide 24/7 customer support to driving data analysis, AI can help small businesses more effectively compete with their larger counterparts. Below, 20 Forbes Technology Council members share practical ways smaller companies can harness the power of AI to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
1. Give Customers 24/7 Access To Needed Information
If we look at the service industry, conversational AI can be leveraged by regional and community businesses to give customers access to answers and valuable information regarding their accounts 24/7, whereas traditionally such access would have been limited by a company’s business hours. Through AI, these businesses can improve customer service without the need for added staff. – Zor Gorelov, Kasisto Inc.
2. Speed Up Time-Consuming Tasks
AI provides small businesses with a unique opportunity. By leveraging it to speed up time-consuming tasks—such as providing customer support through AI-powered chatbots or adding personalization to products and marketing—they can free up more time to deepen relationships with clients, understand their needs and be more strategic. These aspects are crucial for improving the customer experience and retention. – Itai Sadan, Duda Inc.
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3. Improve The Customer Life Cycle
AI allows smaller companies to improve the entire customer life cycle, from enhancing the speed and convenience of service to providing high-touch, personalized experiences. For example, companies can provide interactive, conversational chatbots to help customers troubleshoot problems instantly without waiting for a human. By adopting AI, smaller companies can provide experiences that were once only available from organizations with more resources. – Kaarel Kotkas, Veriff
4. Craft Authentic Messaging
Speed and customization are essential for a remarkable customer experience, and AI helps small businesses achieve both. Platforms that leverage text-based language models can empower business owners to craft personalized, authentic messaging in minutes. When applied to critical customer interactions, such as responding to inquiries, AI can be the difference between booking or missing out on a client. – Oz Alon, HoneyBook
5. Gain Insights On Customer Trends
Companies of any size, including SMBs and solopreneurs, can use generative AI chatbots as a key way to gain insights on customer trends. This AI allows them to offer valuable services that increase customer engagement. Yet, for AI-driven chat experiences to truly add value, they need to tap into existing customer data, enabling them to provide the personalized interactions consumers demand today. – Itzik Levy, vcita
6. Retrieve Data And Capture Customer Conversations
AI helps employees service customers with less effort, resulting in better experiences and cost savings, too. For instance, AI can be trained to retrieve precise knowledge with just a prompt. It can summarize cases and conversations automatically, eliminating manual note-taking. AI can also recommend responses and next-best actions based on a customer’s unique data. – Alfred Kahn, OvationCXM
7. Strengthen Customer Relationships
Identifying the most effective ways to speak to customers is key to improving your CX. With specialized, self-service GenAI tools, even midsize businesses can now create personalized, emotionally engaging language to improve the CX across channels, strengthen customer relationships and increase lead conversion. – Assaf Baciu, Persado
8. Build Integrated Process Flows
A combination of backend and frontend AI tools can help SMEs build integrated process flows 24/7, which greatly alleviates manpower constraints. This allows for greater timeliness, personalization and resolution for customers. Consequently, this also allows sales, marketing and product teams to spend more time creating and implementing value-added services for customers. – Camellia Chan, Flexxon
9. Collect And Analyze Data
Leveraging AI to do the work of data collection and analysis frees up people to do what they do best. It provides the building blocks for better decision making and the specialized intelligence to enhance our generalized intelligence. By analyzing customers’ behavior, purchase histories and preferences, AI can personalize the customer experience and provide a massive opportunity for SMEs to up their game. – Pete Hanlon, Moneypenny
10. Ensure Accurate Pricing
Using AI for loan decisions enables quicker processing, allowing smaller financial institutions to optimize staff time for personalized customer interactions. Highly granular, AI-powered analysis also ensures accurate pricing is aligned with application risk, enhancing the overall customer experience and appealing to younger borrowers. – Sarah Lackey, Open Lending
11. Generate Interactive Marketing Materials
Basic generative AI use cases—such as helping marketing teams generate materials or creating an interactive Q&A on a website—might be the easiest applications to achieve. Many traditional AI uses, such as measuring customer sentiment or recommendation engines, assume that data is collected and accessible, limiting the opportunity for some smaller companies. – Laura Merling
12. Create Niche Content
Small businesses often lack marketing resources. AI-powered content creation tools can help by automatically generating targeted blogs, social media and marketing materials. This saves small teams time while ensuring content resonates with niche audiences, driving engagement and loyalty. – Greg Salvato, TouchPoint One
13. Streamline Customer Support
Implementing AI-powered chatbots can be an impactful way for smaller companies to improve customer support. By leveraging AI, brands can streamline simple queries and offer instant, personalized assistance 24/7, significantly improving the overall customer experience. Chatbot deployments can also support internal teams, enabling employees to focus on addressing more complex customer concerns. – Michael Ringman, TELUS International
14. Make Personal, Contextual Recommendations
AI can be an amazing tool for augmenting existing personalization techniques in small companies and startups. This is especially true when a company doesn’t have a sufficient amount of data or resources to train models internally. I recently worked on a project where we employed ChatGPT to classify and tag our content, allowing us to make contextual recommendations—quite well, actually! – Elliott Cordo, Data Futures
15. Draft Personalized Marketing Content
One of the easier ways is to use generative AI for scaling and personalizing sales and marketing content—for example, newsletters or promotional emails. Personalized outreach is a rather boring and time-consuming task, so AI makes life easier for employees. Moreover, targeting customers according to their preferences, behaviors or sociodemographic traits is more effective. – Julius Černiauskas, Oxylabs
16. Automate The Collection And Summarization Of Customer Feedback
Customers eagerly share feedback across support tickets, social posts and surveys. This presents a challenge: relevant information sits siloed across systems. But AI now enables automating the extraction and summarization of dispersed customer input. Small businesses should reexamine their feedback channels and apply technology to synthesize insights and convert customer perspectives into action. – Matt Berseth, NLP Logix
17. Increase Customer Touch Points To Improve Data Collection
We all want to be able to understand how our customers feel about our companies. Currently, we use customer surveys; however, most surveys are built around fairly superficial touch points. Using artificial intelligence, we could increase the number of touch points, which would provide more effective data and feedback to help us build customer loyalty and trust. – Chris Briggs, Mitek Systems
18. Train New Team Members More Quickly
AI can empower smaller companies to enhance their customer experience by helping train junior team members faster and better. With AI, new hires can rapidly assimilate knowledge, conduct research more effectively and make accurate projections. This leads to a more professional image and better customer interactions, ultimately elevating the overall service quality. – Rachel Lyubovitzky, Setuply, Inc.
19. Customize Offers And User Journeys
At the forefront of customer loyalty are AI engines that analyze customers’ behaviors, crafting customized offers or user journeys. Opting for ethical models devoid of personal data usage enables the creation of unique user experiences for each customer. This approach imparts a sense of exclusive service, even in small businesses. – Kseniia Maiboroda, Elevatix
20. Monitor Social Media
A low-cost, easy application of AI that would not place a financial strain on small businesses—and is also very useful—is social media monitoring. Small businesses rely heavily on social media for their marketing, and AI can help with monitoring social media for brand mentions, sentiment analysis and engagement tracking. – AJ Abdallat, Beyond Limits
