Natural language processing (NLP) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with the interaction between humans using natural language and computers. Simply speaking, it’s technology that helps computers understand people’s natural language. It’s not just about picking out a few specific words and spouting out a generalized answer either. Rather, NLP can comprehend meaning and context and provide automated support with a personal touch.

Natural language processing and artificial intelligence were once technologies only available to mega-corporations. But now, small businesses can use NLP and AI to their advantage too. So, are you wondering how you can use NLP to improve the customer experience, streamline processes, and even generate sales?

Here are 4 business applications for natural language processing.

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Chatbots

Chatbots are almost necessary in today’s world because customers want to be able to contact businesses and get answers to their questions 24/7. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. And 60% of customers define "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.

Since many businesses can’t provide live chat agents around the clock, chatbots can take their place and offer assistance day and night. When you pair your chatbot with natural language processing, your chatbots are no longer robotic. Instead, they can actually have conversations like a real human.

With NLP, chatbots can recognize the user intent behind the words, identify key data through words related to date, time, location, etc., recognize tense of verbs, and more. Having the ability to understand this type of information allows the chatbot to comprehend what your customers are saying and come up with the best response.

Customer Service

Aside from creating more life-like chatbots, NLP can be used to optimize your customer service as a whole. For example, natural language processing and natural language understanding can improve your interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Instead of having callers hang up in frustration over not being understood by your system, with NLP the system can understand callers in their own words, comprehend context in replies, and even ask callers open-ended questions. This can skyrocket the success of your IVR system and result in more satisfied customers.

Speaking of satisfied customers, natural language processing can also perform sentiment analysis. This will allow you to discover how your customers feel about your brand. NPL can analyze comments or messages on your social media accounts and determine the emotions and feelings behind them like whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral as well as if the underlying mood is happy, sad, annoyed, and so on. Using this information you can make improvements to your business to increase the satisfaction of your customers.

Hiring and Recruiting

Hiring and recruiting can be a costly and time-consuming process. Luckily, with natural language processing, you can find top talent for your company a little bit easier.

For instance, the tool Textio uses natural language processing to help you write stronger job descriptions to attract more qualified candidates. It can also detect biased wording in your hiring content that you weren’t even consciously aware of.

And Mya is an AI and NLP tool that is able to engage with candidates from the beginning of the recruiting process until they’re hired. A tool like this will keep your candidates engaged and streamline the hiring process by handling screening, answering questions from the candidate, schedule interviews, and more.

Advertising

Want to increase the effectiveness of your advertising? With natural language processing you can put your ads right in front of the consumers that are most likely to be interested in what you’re offering. NLP is able to analyze search keywords, browsing behavior, emails, and social media platforms to help your business find potential customers online.

NLP can also improve your copywriting. For instance, Persado uses natural language processing to help you write marketing content that better aligns with your brand voice and can provide insights on which messages are most appealing to your target audience.

Conclusion

As you can see, when computers understand humans, it can have big benefits for your business — and NLP will only get more and more advanced. Start looking into how you can implement natural language processing tools to grow your business more efficiently and effectively.

Further Reading

Natural Language Processing

A Guide to Natural Language Processing (Part 1)