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Thanks to increasing digitization and the rising need for personalization, we have reached a stage where mere human intelligence is not enough to fulfill the needs of an organization. Businesses around the world have been seeing an increase in the complexity in the processes to be carried out, the need to get work done on time, and to tailor their services according to the specific needs of their customers. 

This calls for the adoption of advanced technologies like predictive intelligence. 

Predictive intelligence works in a way that is extremely similar to that of a human brain. When you feed your system with data over time, it analyzes the datasets and finds patterns in the same. This, coupled with the use of appropriate algorithms allows your system to make calculated predictions and provide you with valuable insights regarding your business. 

When you implement predictive intelligence within your system, it helps you in making calculated decisions, predict the needs of your customers/employees, and allow you to be prepared for the inevitable. 

However, it is important to note that the purpose of using predictive intelligence for your business processes is not to replace your employees. Instead, the technology allows you to provide wholesome assistance to your employees and improve their productivity. 

Why Do You Need Predictive Intelligence?

Intense Competition 

One of the key reasons why businesses need to adopt predictive intelligence is to get an edge over their competitors. The competition in every sector of every industry is fierce and requires all players to show their A-game to survive in the market. Predictive intelligence helps you anticipate demands, forecast sales, and take important measures that help you stay ahead of the curve. 

Complicated Business Processes 

Business processes are no longer as simple as approaching the customers/clients, providing them with products or services, and keeping a track of the transactions incurred. Over time, these processes have become more complicated and involve advanced customer profiling, assessment of needs, and analyzing the behavior of your customers to serve them better. Predictive intelligence helps you in carrying out these processes in a faster, more accurate, and more effective manner. 

Need For Personalized Support 

Both your customers and employees need you to handle their specific cases and provide solutions that are unique to their needs. Using predictive intelligence allows you to track the journey of your customers, assess all their actions, and provide the support that is customized according to their needs and preferences. 

We will talk about the use of predictive intelligence for employee support later in the blog. 

A Helping Hand For Employees 

Owing to business processes getting increasingly complicated and customer demands increasing steadily, employees often have a hard time keeping up with the tasks to be performed and performing them well. Implementing platforms with predictive intelligence helps them get their work done in a faster way with reduced scope for error. Especially when it comes to performing repetitive tasks and making quick assessments of large datasets, the technology saves the day by being a steady assistant to your employees. 

Business Applications Of Predictive Intelligence

Targeting The Right Customers 

Businesses can no longer get away with generic marketing techniques and expect to persuade their customers. It is important for an organization to select a specific group of audiences and target the same to get the desired traction. Such a focused approach helps businesses to streamline their communication and reach out to the right prospects at the right time. 

Platforms with predictive intelligence help you scout the market and find prospects that best suit your target audience. There are three major factors that a system would take into consideration while targeting the right customers – socio-demographic factors, engagement factors, and past campaign factors. 

The socio-demographic factors allow the system to segregate the audience on the basis of their age, education, marital status, profession, etc. When the system takes engagement factors into consideration, it helps you select and approach prospects based on the frequency of interactions, how recently they interacted with you, the expenses incurred during the interactions, and other factors relevant to customer engagement. 

Finally, the past campaign factors allow your platform with predictive intelligence to target the most suitable customers based on the actions taken by them during your past campaigns. 

Effective Churn Prevention 

Predictive intelligence tools are often used by businesses to prevent frequent churns and ensure that the customers are engaged with the organization for a longer period of time. Feeding sufficient data about your transactional history and past relationships with the customers allows your system to predict the reasons why your customers are likely to end their relationship with your business and make a switch. 

With the help of big customer datasets, the technology helps you come up with robust predictive models that help you work on your existing customers, ascertain the areas that might be problematic, and resolve issues before it is too late. 

Here are some of the key attributes you can use for creating a sustainable predictive model for churn prevention: 

• Engagement Variables – Frequency of engagement, recency of engagement, revenue earned from a customer, etc. 
  
  
• Product/Services Variables – The products or services preferred by specific customers 
  
  
• Technical Variables – Customer services provided, calls/emails received, etc. 
  
  
• Stationery Variables – The date, time, and season of purchase 
  
  
• Platforms Used – Mobile, web, applications, physical purchase, etc. 
  
  
• Competitor Variables – Customers’ engagement with competing companies 
  
  

Predictive intelligence helps you analyze each of these variables and provide you with valuable insights about the reasons behind your customers ending engagement with your business. Subsequently, the technology would also help you in coming up with ways to combat the churns and help you retain your valuable customers. 

Forecasting Sales 

Sales is the primary source of income for an organization and influences several decisions made by the senior management. It is always important to be calculative when it comes to allocating the right resources and taking the right measures for conducting the desired amount of sales and earning the desired revenue. 

With predictive intelligence, you can feed your system with your sales data and it would analyze aspects such as sales history, market-moving events for your business, seasonality of your sales, sales frequency, etc. These details help the system make valuable and calculated predictions about the sales you are likely to conduct during a specific season. You can use the same data for obtaining short-term, medium-term, and long-term sales forecasts and plan your strategies accordingly. 

Improving The Quality Of Offerings 

Owing to intense competition, it is important for a business to provide quality products and services to its customers. The use of predictive intelligence allows you to scout and analyze market surveys carried out by your team or external sources. This research helps you understand the quality of offerings your customers are looking for and make necessary improvements in the products/services that you provide. 

Through predictive analytics, your system can analyze data about the specific characteristics preferred by your target audience, the different tastes of the customers, and specific demographics that prefer buying the products/services that you offer. 

Predicting Customer Behaviour 

It is extremely difficult for businesses to determine set patterns in the needs and preferences of their customers owing to the ever-changing market trends. However, using predictive intelligence can provide you with a calculated idea about the manner in which your customers are likely to behave. 

The technology allows your system to scan through your database and analyze the actions undertaken by specific customers, the purchases made by them, the frequency of their purchases, and the monetary value of the purchases. These details allow your system to find patterns in the behavior of your customers and predict the manner in which they are likely to respond to your campaigns. 

Assessing Risks 

You cannot afford to take a risky step in business without analyzing its consequences and preparing for all the likely outcomes. Predictive intelligence allows you to analyze the risks you are willing to take and keep a track of the problems that may arise due to the same. 

This allows the management to take all preventive measures and tread in a systematic manner when it comes to taking risks. Developing powerful decision support systems for your business helps you estimate the likelihood of an action bearing positive results. Based on the possible consequences of the same, you can take a call on going ahead with the risk or avoiding it to play safe. 

Predictive Intelligence And Employee Service Desks

Apart from catering to your customers the right way and making important business decisions, predictive intelligence can be used to provide seamless and integrated support to your employees. 

The technology is implemented within modern employee service desks to overcome the shortcomings of their traditional counterparts. The traditional service desks lacked an integrated approach and were hardly successful in providing personalized solutions to the employees’ problems. Also, organizations were not able to exploit their enterprise knowledge base to an optimum level, resulting in delayed responses, unorganized support, and generic solutions. 

However, the advent of AI-based service desks allowed every employee within an organization to obtain customized support within a few seconds. 

Use Of Chatbots 

The modern service desks make use of AI chatbots for handling the queries of the employees. Using this technology, you can have all your employees guided by a virtual assistant that would provide quick answers to all their questions. Instead of routing all the requests to the support agents, the chatbots provide the first level of support, making the system more streamline and clutter-free. 

However, if an employee is not satisfied with the L1 support provided by the chatbots, they will automatically raise a ticket and route the concerned case to a suitable agent. 

Understanding The Context 

The use of AI allows your service desk to understand the context of the questions asked and problems faced by your employees. The serviced desk analyzes all datasets relevant to a specific employee, keeps a track of their transactional history, scans the enterprise knowledge base, and comes up with a solution that is tailored just for the concerned employee. 

Moreover, understanding the context of the questions asked helps an employee service desk to make personalized recommendations to your employees that help them improve their work and prevent similar issues from arising again. 

Providing Employee Training 

You can cut down on your employee training costs by feeding your AI employee service desks with relevant training resources. If your employee needs to learn specific skills to perform their jobs or if they are willing to work on their existing skills, they can get themselves trained using a single unified platform. 

Apart from saving money, this helps organizations in letting their employees get self-reliant. If your employees tend to learn new skills and overcome hurdles on their own, it naturally motivates them to work harder, be more engaged at work, and increase their productivity. 

Automated Knowledge Management 

Using AI in employee service desks allows you to manage your enterprise knowledge in the best way possible. As opposed to the traditional service desks providing generic information in the name of solutions, the modern counterparts are equipped to be precise in the solutions they provide and the data they store for future reference. 

Moreover, automated knowledge management also allows organizations to provide support in a variety of formats other than plain text. You can choose to provide solutions to your employees in the form of videos, images, infographics, or animations. This increases the retention capacity of your employees and allows them to understand the solutions better. 

The Final Word 

Although it was introduced to perform high-end operations and analytics, predictive intelligence is getting increasingly common and relevant with time. It is always advisable for businesses to make a switch from traditional techniques and embrace the change to have a long and successful run in the market.