Machine Learning is about extracting meaningful information to identify patterns that could help to greatly improve business management. What are the main benefits of Machine Learning?
Nowadays, we can take advantage of technology to achieve things that until today were only done by humans. Machine Learning is becoming one of the most powerful tools that could help organizations to get positive impacts by making better business decisions. In this case, complex algorithms are used to improve and adapt the business processes by the means of Machine Learning technology.
What exactly is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning is a field evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence. It is about extracting meaningful information from a huge set of raw data and applying intelligent algorithms that analyze that data to identify patterns that could help to improve many business management characteristics.
Moreover, a Machine Learning process can learn from previous decisions and improve its own. The more meaningful the data a Machine Learning algorithm consumes, the more precise and wiser its decisions and behavior are going to be.
Three ways your business can benefit from Machine Learning
Applied to e-commerce, Machine Learning can be helpful for many business aspects, including the ability to personalize each interaction with their customers, thus providing them with a better experience. There are three benefits that could be obtained when applying this technology to your business:
1. Powerful searching
Instead of using traditional search methods based on keyword matching, Machine Learning can be used to perform more personalized searches by studying customer behaviors to know what the products are that they consume. This is done by intelligent processes that take historical customers data to identify patterns that could recognize what consumers are looking for.
Searching is a key aspect that could benefit both retailers and shoppers.
From a business point of view, every product that fails to appear in a user search could represent a loss of a selling opportunity, so Machine Learning provides a way to guess what a potential customer could be looking for and to persuade them with a list of products that could be of their interest.
For shoppers, a sophisticated process could improve their search experience by helping them find products based on what is relevant to them. Searches can be configured to concentrate on data such as a client´s specific buying habits, age, brand, colors, and looks of their preference or even the type of budget they may have to work with.
2. Product recommendation
Additionally, Machine Learning algorithms can be used in e-commerce websites to implement product recommendation processes as a way to increase the company’s earnings.
Intelligent selling processes could be configured to recommend certain products based, not only on customer preferences, but also taking into account other aspects like popularity, demographics information, or even a specific holiday or event (Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, back to school, etc.) to prioritize products that are likely to bring in the most revenue or generate incremental sales for the business.
Furthermore, if we can predict someone´s shopping list, we can suggest him/her a lot more by either offering additional items that may complement the items he/she just purchased or recommending items in other independent categories that, according to historical data, we know the customer might be interested in.
All this is achieved by analyzing customer data from different channels, to identify behavior and purchasing patterns which can be used to predict what customers actually want in order to get a process that can proactively recommend relevant products and services to existing customers.
3. Customer service efficiency
Another business area where Machine Learning could notably help to improve is customer service efficiency. Since it does not mean to completely replace human customer service representatives by an automated process, it is about optimizing processes by letting humans concentrate on what they do best. It is about a collaborative process between machines and humans.
Machine Learning processes can be used to simulate human conversations through chat messages or voice, generating customized chatbots or virtual assistants to drastically reduce the cost and amount of time invested in managing customer relationships while also satisfying the customer demand times.
A chatbot can be configured to handle simple questions, but as soon as the conversation becomes too complicated, that chatbot can hand the conversation off to a human. The human can handle the more difficult task and even hand the interaction back to the bot to continue managing simple details.
This machine-human collaboration process maximizes the time human agents spend doing what only human agents currently can do and minimizes the time they spend on tasks that bots can handle.
Moreover, Machine Learning can also be used to read incoming emails to figure out customer needs and how to deal with every particular case to speed up the customer service process.
To Sum Up
Machine Learning is becoming a huge leap ahead for e-commerce companies looking to automate many of their most resource-intensive and costly manual processes in order to gain meaningful insights into their customers that benefit both counterparts, retailers and clients.
This article mentions some of the business processes that could be enhanced if we take advantage of this technology, but there are many more aspects in business that can be improved with this innovation.
We encourage you to review your business and see how you can get benefits from Machine Learning.