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Communication

How to Optimize B2B Customer Communication with Slack & AI

Paulina
Content Writer
August 9, 2023

In 2022, the global artificial intelligence (AI) market was valued at USD 136.55 billion. Experts predict that it will experience a remarkable compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030.

The AI industry spans across numerous sectors, including supply chains, marketing, research, and customer communications. One notable example is AI chatbots enabling B2C businesses to offer instant, 24/7 customer support and efficiently handle repetitive queries. However, the advancements in generative AI technology are taking things even further, extending its applications to B2B customer communications.

The exponential growth of artificial intelligence and the rising popularity of collaboration platforms such as Slack present unprecedented opportunities for businesses to optimize their B2B customer communication.

This article delves into AI's crucial role in B2B communication and the transformative impact of combining Slack with AI-powered solutions like Thena on customer engagement, experience, retention, and business growth.

Role of AI in the B2B Customer Communication

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are absolutely changing the way we communicate and manage B2B customers. The adoption of these technologies is opening new frontiers and transforming vendor-customer engagement by providing dynamic and real-time communication solutions.

AI-powered systems can generate unique responses, understand the context of conversations, and offer tailored customer stories, boosting customer satisfaction and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Here are some ways how AI can enhance B2B customer communication:

  • Personalizing interactions based on historical data and conversations;
  • Understanding customer preferences through natural language processing;
  • Automatically detecting customer requests and asks for support as part of conversations and turning them into support tickets;
  • Analyzing customer feedback and sentiment to increase customer retention or capitalize on upselling opportunities (real-time data over intuition);
  • Automating the measuring of customer service metrics as part of customer conversations:
  • Automating repetitive tasks to free up human agents and reduce errors.

Having explored the overall role of AI in B2B customer communications, it's time to delve into how Slack leverages AI technology to enhance its features. Specifically, let's focus on how Slack's AI capabilities assist B2B organizations in effectively managing their customers.

How Does Slack Meet AI?

When you hear Slack and AI, you don’t immediately put the two together. While Slack is not entirely built on AI, it does incorporate certain aspects of AI into its platform. This, however, is changing, fast.

Slack has recently unveiled its vision of bringing generative AI to the forefront of the user experience. This forward-looking approach aims to enhance the way users access information and construct workflows, streamlining the overall experience and making it more intuitive and efficient. With this exciting development, Slack is poised to harness the potential of AI to transform the way people interact and collaborate within their platform.

Take a look at how Slack utilizes AI:

Smart Search: Slack's AI-powered search feature goes beyond traditional keyword matching. It employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the context of queries, delivering more accurate and relevant search results.

Workflow Automation: Slack leverages AI to intelligently automate mundane task management that bogs down team members. From scheduling reminders to organizing documents, the AI-powered task management system optimizes team efficiency, allowing members to focus on high-value strategic activities.

Intelligent Suggestions: Slack's AI-driven search feature enables organizations to access critical information swiftly. The system learns from user searches, ranking results based on relevance and context. Additionally, it can extract essential data from documents and conversations.

Language Processing: The underlying AI framework in Slack allows for sophisticated language processing, enabling features like sentiment analysis. This can help gauge the overall mood and sentiment of the team or your customers, providing valuable insights into their engagement.

Bot Integrations: Slack works with bots to perform a bunch of functions, such as scheduling, project management, or customer support.

It's worth mentioning that Slack itself doesn't develop AI algorithms or technologies, but it provides a platform that allows users to integrate various AI-powered services, bots, and tools. This flexibility is great because it lets organizations personalize and level up their Slack experience with the power of AI. Pretty neat, right?

How Thena Connects the Dots

Customer engagement, experience, retention, and growth are the cornerstones of successful B2B businesses. AI, when combined with the collaborative capabilities of Slack and tools like Thena, unlocks a multitude of opportunities to achieve these goals.

Request Detection

Thena's AI capabilities enable automatic detection and categorization of customer requests in Slack Connect Channels. The tool leverages AI algorithms to ensure no customer interaction slips through the cracks. That helps to provide timely response and resolution, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and building stronger relationships.

Request Summaries

Another powerful way Thena’s AI capabilities help you make the most out of Slack is

through real-time request summaries. So, rather than going through lengthy customer messages scattered across several Slack Connect Channels to grasp the essence of each query, Thena summarizes Slack threads. 

This saves your team time while ensuring that no important customer concerns go unnoticed. Plus, this way you can prioritize customer interactions and attend to the most pressing issues first.

Sentiment Detection in Customer Messages

Additionally, Thena’s AI-driven sentiment analysis helps you to analyze the 

the emotional tone of customer messages on Slack, empowering you to tailor your responses accordingly.

Thanks to Thena, you can recognize positive and negative sentiments and proactively address customer concerns. Stepping in early on (before any real issues arise) can enhance customer satisfaction and help you nurture long-term relationships.

AI-Based Tags

Gone are the days of manual tagging. Thanks to Thena's AI-powered tagging feature, businesses can now automate the process of categorizing and organizing customer messages. This automation involves assigning AI-based tags, enabling you to efficiently manage your communication flows, easily retrieve information, and gain valuable insights into customer trends and preferences.

Urgency

Lastly, Thena helps to effectively prioritize customer requests. The tool’s AI algorithms assess the urgency of each customer message, helping businesses allocate resources accordingly. By automating the process of urgency determination, you can rest assured that critical inquiries are promptly addressed, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Slack + AI + Thena is the Future of B2B Communication

The era of optimized B2B customer communication has arrived, thanks to the powerful combination of Slack, AI, and Thena. Leveraging the collaborative capabilities of Slack and the AI-driven features of Thena, businesses can transform the way they engage with customers, enhance their experiences, retain their loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth.

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