Question

You are a business and technology consultant providing consulting services to a new client who owns a small business selling tax preparation services over the internet. Your client has given you the following parameters of her business:

• Serving about 1500 customers annually
• All work needs to be done over the internet using remote contractors to help during tax season
• The customers pay for services using credit cards
• All work is estimated prior to an engagement, then contracts are generated and executed before work begins

Given this information, you will be providing recommendations on the following:

1. How can your client use technology to stay ahead of the competition?

Answer 1

Ways You Can Leverage New Technology to Stay Ahead of the Competition:-

1. Automate back-office tasks - The biggest roadblock to work-life balance was the administrative tasks involved in keeping their business afloat. AI can take care of those repetitive, time-consuming and mundane administrative tasks, so your time can be spent on more strategic, entrepreneurial work. This can range from automating simple customer service inquiries to putting AI to work on accounting needs.

2. Make smarter business decisions - AI can be your unbiased advisor, methodically sorting through the mounds of data your business produces to surface deep insights. It can also expedite important business decisions, like deciding whether to enter a new market or adopt a new tool or technology. As an example, PwC's DeNovo tool, available to small businesses, evaluates the disruptive potential of a given financial technology and assesses whether and how a business can best leverage it.

3. Deliver highly personalized customer experiences - Machine learning, an advanced form of AI, uses algorithms to glean hidden insights from data without being explicitly programmed to do so. By learning from past experiences, it's able to create more relevant and personalized experiences for customers (you can thank machine learning for all those useful Netflix and Amazon content recommendations). Personalized product experiences are hugely important for small businesses, as they're known for their personal touch with customers, but in-house machine learning requires an immense amount of data that small businesses often lack. Fortunately, small businesses can now easily and affordably adopt machine learning technology leveraging third-party tools and open-source software. One example of this is Acquisio, an AI-based marketing tool specifically built for small businesses that help them optimize the online customer acquisition process.

4. Gain customer insights for better decision making - AI doesn't just use data to determine how customers might behave; it uses data to draw conclusions about how to better serve customers. If you want to stay competitive, you can use this information to identify patterns and make better decisions about how to evolve a product or service over time to meet customer needs. IBM's Watson Analytics program - available as a mobile app or on the web - helps businesses of all sizes make predictions about the future using all types of current data, including information from marketing, sales, HR, finance and so on.

5. Employ a virtual personal assistant -

AI-powered personal assistants can take care of everything from calendaring to sending reminders, to scheduling meetings on your behalf. If you use Apple's Siri in your day-to-day life, you're already familiar with the basics of this, but she's hardly alone. A tool called x.ai provides a personal assistant for busy professionals that works by simply CCing an AI named "Amy" on your emails. These tools are particularly useful to solopreneurs or small business owners who lack the resources and aren't quite ready to make hires, but who still need to optimize their time.

As the practical benefits of AI are realized, more and more business professionals are warming up to the concept. Forrester recently found that more than half of surveyed business and tech professionals were considering implementing AI. Entrepreneurs and small business owners should be no exception. AI has the power to enrich the small business experience and help your business maintain its competitive edge against big and small players alike.