AI and Machine Learning have become very crucial in the business world, these two technologies can solve complex problems and speed up time-consuming processes. The usage of AI and ML can be seen through everyday examples such as auto text correction and prediction used in typing, personal assistant, search engine, chatbots, personalized advertisement, and more.
It is being used in every sector of every industry such as Healthcare, Education, Advertisement, Transportation and Logistics, and more. Similarly, adding AI and ML to your SaaS product can increase its efficiency in providing services. Big players in the market such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are offering SaaS products that use AI and ML to make them more robust. The impact of AI and ML in SaaS products is becoming a key differentiator.
How SaaS uses AI and ML?
1. Personalization using AI
Consumers are unique individuals, they have different interests, preferences, and concerns, sending the same message to every one of your customers are unlikely to bring benefits. In fact, modern-day businesses can’t survive with cookie-cutter messaging to their customers. Moving ahead with more features without analyzing individual behavior of your customers you may not find many users for new features and it may just clutter your UI. Introducing personalization becomes a challenge when you have a large number of customers, it requires a significant amount of resources to bring in personalization.
Using AI and ML, you can analyze the massive amount of data generated by customer interaction with your product it gives you a good understanding of individual customer intentions. With the help of insights gathered from analyzing your individual customer behavior, you can categorize them into meaningful segments. You can further tailor your marketing messages according to the customer’s interest and behavior pattern. It is important for SaaS products to bring in personalization backed by AI and ML capabilities into the system at scale to realize customer’s needs and to stay competitive in the market.
2. Serve customers with chatbots
With the growing number of customers, customer service functions may see a rise in complexity. Especially in the case of SaaS businesses, it is operated remotely, customers are from all over the world and you get questions from all geographies. You can find it challenging to build a large team of customer support executives to handle such a large volume of questions in different time -zones.
You can use AI-powered chatbots to manage a large number of customer support requests. You can train these chatbots with previous customer support databases so that they can solve simpler questions. For example, the password reset request is backed by a chatbot that quickly directs users to a knowledge base article. It is available 24x7 to cater to customers without delay. You can train your chatbots to solve more complex queries so that chatbots can handle more queries and you can make better utilization of your customer support team. AI-powered chatbots are important for every SaaS product as it reduces the complexity in customer support functions.
3. Increase customer engagement with ML
Customer engagement is crucial for every business because it leads to conversion, customer retention, and increased revenue. It is also important to track disengaging customers and disinterested customers. Disengaging customers can switch to other providers if corrective actions are not taken. In the case of SaaS business, it is hard to find out when a customer is disengaging because your interaction with the customer is mainly through your product.
It is required to analyze how customers are using your product or reducing usage. You can use machine learning to perform predictive analysis to predict the future behavior of your customer. It indicates if the customer is disengaging or reducing the use of the product. You can further address the issues faced by your customer. Machine Learning driven predictive analysis is one of the most important factors for SaaS products.
4. Improve your marketing using AI and ML
Marketing is one of the most important factors in SaaS businesses, without marketing no one will know about your SaaS product. Digital marketing is a key aspect of SaaS marketing, which includes SEO, paid ads, social media marketing, email marketing. All digital marketing tools heavily rely on AI and ML. All digital marketing platforms help in you doing customer segmentation, targeted marketing, demographic analysis, content engagement. All these tools are based upon AI and ML. ML can identify the customer behavior and perform a smart auto segmentation of your customers. ML can also help you to find the best lead generation strategy by analyzing data collected by different surveys.
5. Security from cyber attacks
In order to secure your product with emerging cyber-attacks, it is important to transition from traditional to modern cybersecurity approaches using AI. These AI-powered systems are trained to detect suspicious patterns online and detect malware or other cybersecurity threats. With the AI capabilities, these systems can eliminate the malware before they make their way into your SaaS product infrastructure. Using AI-powered cybersecurity systems is crucial as cybercriminals are creating new malware every day.
6. Helps in release management
Release management refers to the deployment of any code changes for a software application, it can be bug fixes, upgrades, and enhancements. It is crucial for SaaS businesses to incorporate AI in their release management because if there is any bug or crash that affects all users, it can be very harmful to your SaaS business. Using AI in release management prevents application downtime and helps in reducing complexity in software release management.
Final Thoughts
With AI and ML, SaaS products are transforming into a new generation of digital products, AI is also embracing new ways to gain a market edge. Many big players are embracing the potential of AI and ML for their SaaS products, it is expected that this growth will continue. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global market of AI was USD 26.67 billion and it is expected to reach USD 202.5 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 33.1% during the forecast period. Thus implementing AI capabilities into your SaaS product has become crucial to stay ahead of the curve.
Author Bio:
Piyush Jain is the founder and CEO of Simpalm, a mobile app development company in Chicago. Piyush founded Simpalm in 2009 and has grown it to be a leading mobile and web Development Company in the DMV area. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and a strong background in technology and entrepreneurship, he understands how to solve problems using technology. Under his leadership, Simpalm has delivered 300+ mobile apps and web solutions to clients in startups, enterprises and the federal sector.
