The holiday season can be hectic for any business. By using AI to help automate tasks and analyze data it can make the holiday season a breeze.

Staffing Shortages

Automated Customer Support

Having a staff shortage can be troublesome, but up to 80% of routine support tickets can be resolved using AI. With AI more staff assigned to tasks that need more attention, and a selected few staff for more complex customer support tasks. You may think that having AI may turn away customers but about 78% of businesses already use AI. An example of this is an AI chatbot. A customer could come in with a question and use the chat box from there the AI could search the company database it has access to and give an answer.

Scheduling

Setting up schedules can be time consuming for managers taking them away from tasks that need their attention. With AI it can reduce the time managers spend creating schedules by 70-80%. AI is able to optimize scheduling which can reduce overstaffing and understaffing by 35-40%.

Some AI that can do this are:

Calendly
Motion
Reclaim.ai
Clockwise
Clara

Receptionists

Customers can feel upset when they call a business and they either get stuck in a wait list or just get sent to voicemail. With AI a customer can call 24/7 and always get answered. About 72% of callers couldn’t tell that they were speaking to AI and not a human. Businesses that use AI receptionists see a 300% increase in appointment bookings as well as costs reduced by 27-90%.

Some companies that use this AI are:

Zoom
Nike
Walmart
Target
American Express
Verizon

Inventory Help

Predict Top Selling Products

By using AI to dive into data and trends it can be used to predict what products will end up being the best sellers. A German retailer used AI to predict which products would sell in the next 30 days and ended up with an 90% accuracy on their products. A paper written by Syed Athif Usman, Mridul Bhattacharjee, Ahmed Abdullah Alsukhailah, Ali Danial Shahzad, Muhammad Shabir Abdul Razick, and Noor Amin for the purpose of helping small and medium businesses researched AI to help predict top selling products. With their research they found that the AI was able to predict top selling products with 94% accuracy.

Prevent stock outs and avoid overorder

Businesses lose about 10-15% of revenue due to stock outs and overordering. Also about 68% of customers abandon a brand after having an out of stock experience. By analyzing data and demand signals, AI can reduce stock out and over-order by 50%. In one case a company increased their forecast accuracy from 70% to 92% and decreased extra inventory by 40%, and stock outs by 60%. Your customers can sign up for an email when something is out of stock to be alerted when it is back in stock. From there your business can use AI to make a personalized email to the customer to let them know. Doing this will give your business contact info, permission to connect, and a way to deepen your relationship with them.

Marketing Help

Personalized promotions and gift recommendations

With personalized experiences customers are more likely to purchase by 80%. AI can make personalized promotions like product recommendations, targeted coupons, seasonal offers, loyalty rewards, and bundles. 78% of customers prefer gifts that were generated by AI. Your business can have AI take over personalized experiences and gift recommendations allowing staff to take care of other tasks.

Adjusted Email campaigns to match individual

AI can make email campaigns that are tailored to each individual. With these personalized emails there is a click increase of 41%. About 63% of businesses already use AI to help tailor their email marketing.

Social Listening Tools to catch trends

AI that uses social listening tools monitors social media analyzing it and detecting when trends are starting to emerge. With that you can hop onto a trend as it is starting and boost your marketing. Using this AI feature you can boost your ROI by about 25%.

Customer Experience

Detect Unhappy customers and help

Advanced AI can help detect negative emotions in customers and change their responses to be appropriate, or send an alert to a staff member so they can step in. AI can help reduce customer churn rate by about 15% by identifying at risk customers.

It can do this by analyzing data from chat logs, emails, support tickets, and social media posts. It then uses language processing to identify negative words, frustration, and confusion while also taking in behavioral signals. Each time the AI notices one of these patterns it increases the risk score. When the score reaches a high level or it can predict that it will, it can automatically alert the staff to take over.

The AI or software that can do this is:

Wonderflow
Votacall
JustCall
Siena Insights

Multilingual support

With AI being available 24/7 and being able to translate, it can help people that don’t speak your language. 60% of customers expect to get help from people in their own language. Even though 88% of support teams offer customer support in multiple languages 28% of customers report that they did not receive support in their language. Your business will still need someone to speak the language and keep an eye on quality control. AI is not always 100% accurate and shouldn’t fully replace people.

AI driven loyalty programs

AI analyzes customer behaviors and preferences and is able to tailor rewards to create personalized experiences. Businesses that use AI to help create these programs report a 20% increase in retention.

Operational Efficiency

Real time fraud detection

AI can analyze a lot of data at once and identify any unusual activity which could lead to fraud. By knowing beforehand you can be better prepared for it you can stop it. Businesses that use this AI fraud detection have a 40% increase in fraud detection accuracy.

AI can do this by analyzing data from different inputs like payments, account logins, transfers. It then will use machine learning models that have been trained by fraud and non fraud behavior. While going over the data, if it detects some activity that could show as fraud like location, rapid transactions, device mismatch, or changes in spending it will flag and block it so that a person can review it. It would also continue to learn as it flags and a person reviews saying that this is fraud or if it is not to become more accurate.

Automate Simple Tasks

Admin automation

AI can take data from various inputs and place them into properly structured databases, freeing time for admins. It can also automatically create reports using the data it has to give reports that are needed. AI can reduce human error in data entry by 30%. 60% of admins have started using AI to help automate tasks to free up more time for more important tasks.

Internal knowledge assistants

Instead of having to email someone to figure out where company documents are, AI can immediately answer the question and provide links to these documents. By stopping these times of communications you can increase your business productivity by 54%.

Shift coverage predictions

AI uses historical data, seasonal trends, and external factors to predict when staff will request time off. Then using these predictions you can make a proper schedule. When AI takes in this and preferences, staff can feel more satisfied in their job. Businesses that use this AI reduce scheduling time by 30% and help with cost reduction.

Post Holiday Recovery

Return and Exchange automation

AI can take over repetitive tasks like figuring out return eligibility, create return labels, and create refunds or give store credits. It can also easily update customers on the return process, saving staff time. Online stores have a higher return rate of 20-30% compared to their physical stores. 67% of customers look at the return policies before making a purchase and 92% of customers will buy again if the return process is easy. Someone will still need to oversee these transactions and make sure no one is trying to abuse this system.

Insights from holiday for future planning

AI can look at the previous year’s holiday data and predict what could happen in the upcoming holiday season. It’ll tell you what products were sold more and suggest discounts to help increase the amount of purchases. Businesses that use AI to help with creating personalized recommendations can see up to 35% increase of online revenue.

Customer re-engagement to bring them back

AI can look at customer behavior and patterns to tell which customers are more likely to re-engage to help businesses focus on those customers. Customers like when they receive personalized campaigns which boosts customer engagement by 26%. AI can take over follow ups with customers freeing time for staff members and increasing response rate by 30%.

The holiday season can be incredibly stressful for businesses, but AI can make it less stressful. AI can:

Take over repetitive tasks
Analyze data constantly and give real time information
Help with your marketing to boost sales
Improve customer experience to keep them coming back
Make your business more efficient and productive
Help you keep up with your competition and market prices
Keep up after the holiday season has ended

AI can be extremely helpful and save a lot of time, but you should always have someone oversee the work. AI is not 100% accurate and can make errors that can be bad for your business. It can also make things up and completely lie. You still want a person steering this in the correct direction and making sure things are going well and ensuring that mistakes are not made.