Welcome to the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where businesses of every size and any industry can automate mundane tasks and repetitive processes, and even become more creative.
There is a common misconception that smaller businesses can’t keep up with the technology that larger industries utilize because of limited budgets and resources. But if you're a savvy business owner in the home service industry, the benefits of exploring the potential impacts of AI are too compelling to ignore.
Let’s explore some common uses and technologies that fit into every marketing plan.
AI is Not a Replacement
In the past, technology has been seen as a way to replace employees with tools that don’t require a paycheck, health insurance or time off. According to a 2022 report by the Society for Human Resource Management, 85% of employers currently see automation as a way to save time and increase efficiency.
But your home service company can’t look at AI as an employee replacement tool. Instead, you need to consider it as a way to enhance your employees’ job roles. It can be used to take over the more tedious aspects of your employees’ roles and leave them with more time for creativity and human-to-human interaction.
If you’ve hired the right team, then the skill set they bring to the table is already valuable and can’t be replaced with a machine.
Let AI do Your Cultivating
Marketers have long used data as a way to understand their target audience’s behavior, look for trends and optimize their campaigns. But someone had to curate that data so it could be used effectively.
With AI, this data can be analyzed and compiled at rapid speeds, which frees up your marketing team to spend its time on more creative endeavors like brand development and allows them the opportunity to plan campaigns with a more strategic approach. AI marketing also helps your team gather more insights into your customers so you can produce more compelling content that is personalized and optimized.
By creating a deeper understanding of your customers’ ages, genders, location and buying histories, your marketing team can create strategies that make your company’s offerings more targeted and relevant.
In marketing, AI can increase social media campaigns by “listening” to data to build a deeper understanding of your customers’ minds. This allows your marketing team to act by ushering customers into the next phase in your sales cycle.
In addition, AI allows you to take the guesswork out of scheduling your social media and blog posts by maximizing it to create the greatest impact on your customers.
And, while the marketing team doesn’t devote its entire focus to customer service, the ability to provide clients with a deeper understanding of their problems makes happier customers. AI can provide your marketing and customer service teams with the data they need to ensure your home service company creates a more effective customer experience.
Adding AI into Home Service Marketing
AI is a powerful tool. For example, it can help home service providers analyze customer data to tailor their marketing strategies, and, employed correctly, it can help level the playing field for smaller home service businesses.
Studies show that about 35% of all companies are already using AI in some capacity and that includes many home service companies. Most of the home service companies that have already deployed AI are using it to supplement their customer service departments.
By using chatbots to answer some basic customer questions, it can improve your customer service team’s efficiency by helping to direct customer traffic to the right department.
You may even be using AI to assist your customer service team by providing them with intelligent recommendations they can make to clients based on the data the customer provides throughout their sales journey.
But your home service business doesn’t have to limit AI’s use to the customer service department.
You can also deploy it in your marketing department to help automate tasks and augment your creative team’s chores by assisting with email, social media and blog content creation. Because AI can help your marketing team create ads and write marketing content, it frees up your team to focus on more detailed marketing tasks such as developing sales strategies and focusing on campaign successes.
As with most new technology, your team might not understand the potential AI can present and will need to become accustomed to AI programs. There’s also no reason you need to break the bank by adopting an expensive AI tool until you are sure you’re ready to use its programs.
There are free open source programs or companies that offer free AI tools on a trial basis such as ChatGPT or Copy.ai that you can try before you buy. By trying these programs first, you can evaluate if AI will have a positive impact on your home service company before you deploy an expensive AI marketing strategy.
With AI, you can automate data collection and analysis, understand your audience’s response in real time, enhance your SEO programs, identify more avatar or lookalike customers and optimize your advertising and marketing spend. At CEO Warrior, our master advisors are highly skilled in helping our home service members learn to use AI effectively for demand generation, content strategy and business development.
AI Won’t be Limited in Home Service
According to the Harvard Business Review, AI can handle narrow tasks like digital ad placement, or assist with broader tasks like enhancing the accuracy of sales forecasts. Right now, many home service companies who are experimenting with AI have used it to handle these tasks. But there’s no reason your company can’t take it a step further.
As AI becomes more sophisticated, it can be used in place of repetitive and simple tasks, allowing the marketing specialists and customer service reps in your organization the time to make more complex decisions. As your home service company begins to struggle with the loss of retiring experts and a tighter job market, AI may be employed to help you reimagine your processes so that you solve these issues.
But, one thing is clear: if you don’t begin to experiment with AI in your home service business, you will be left behind. Since AI can help you fill in labor gaps, improve your marketing outreach and strengthen your customers’ experience, you can’t afford not to deploy it in your business model.
You’ll do well if you remember that AI is a tool. It will never replace the human touch, but it can inform and optimize it.
Liz Cope serves as CEO Warrior’s chief commercial officer and leads the company’s sales, marketing and partnerships teams. Cope’s teams are the commercial engine for CEO Warrior, growing the brand, generating demand and ensuring its partnership and rebate program brings continuous benefit to its members. Cope has used her deep functional expertise to successfully build and lead teams responsible for strategic and global sales, business development, marketing operations, brand, digital, marketing analytics, demand generation and partnerships at multiple Fortune 500 companies.