Role of Artificial Intelligence in Online Communities

Can you name one area where AI has not stretched its roots into? You’ll really have to mull over that one.

Artificial Intelligence ruled the technological trends of the 2010s, and even as we enter into the next decade, the excitement around it hasn’t waned. AI gave wings to our whimsical fantasies of making ‘intelligent’ machines. Machines that aren’t just able to read, but also, understand user needs based on context and make intelligent predictions predicated on that information (read data).

But what made AI so buzzworthy were the real benefits that businesses could reap from. On the forefront, some of these were:

1. Strengthening customer support systems
2. Creating new opportunities
3. Improving the chances for automation
4. Enhancing personalization
5. Saving time and money
6. Improving the efficiency of operations

AI can profit a business no matter how they choose to employ it. But one of its biggest use-cases may be in customer success or support efforts, especially in online communities.

What Role Can AI Play in Communities?

Most businesses define the role of an online community manager as merely a moderator, whose duty is to search for articles, count the clicks, etc. However, a community manager can have a lot more power than just that. They can use their contacts to form deeper and more meaningful relationships with the members and run successful loyalty programs. But for that, they need some time on their hands.

This can be done by cutting out some repetitive and monotonous tasks from their routine and giving them time to deep dive into communities and add value to its users.

This is where AI can step in.

Let’s understand how-

1. AI Can Help Scale Communities

As your customer base grows, so does the burden on your community manager. It becomes extremely difficult for a manager to provide relevant information required by a user from the knowledge repository. Any lack here will only lead to the queues for support.

AI and Machine Learning (ML) present a solution to this.

ML is becoming all the more sophisticated as we speak. It has developed the ability to not only understand the keywords, but also the context of the content. Due to its ability to infer deep meaning from the conversation, AI and ML can eventually help achieve accurate content matching, without needing any human help. This will not only ease the load on community managers but will also prove a cost-effective method for providing instant support.

2. It Improves Community Search and Customer Service

A community’s value is dependent on the experience that it provides to its customers. Nowadays, personalization is a key factor in determining how any customer-facing platform is faring on the scale of user experience and communities are no exception.

That’s right, community search has grown wide and strong now. More and more advanced communities are supporting search engine tools that combine multiple content sources like knowledge base and FAQs; which picks out the results that are best suited to the searches that a user makes. However, not all search tools are capable of this. Especially the dictionary-based ones that are unable to understand the context of the search and only pick up on the keywords.

But with AI, this can be sorted. An AI-powered search engine tracks the customer history, as well as, journey, which includes analyzing comments, pages viewed, purchase history, etc. and display relevant and personalized searches.

***

AI has proven to be a cost-effective solution for a wide variety of business challenges and therefore many top companies have started investing in it on many fronts. As far as communities are concerned, AI can really help in driving adoption and deepen the community’s ability to help an organization in improving his rapport with his customers. This is one of the top reasons why companies are investing more in community programs.

Does the Merger of AI and Communities Sound Interesting to You? Contact Us!