Conversation Intelligence

What is Conversation Intelligence?

Conversation intelligence is AI-powered technology used in the analysis of text or speech to gather meaningful insights from customer conversations. Conversation intelligence software is integrated with other business platforms like CRM and data analytics systems so businesses can take action on gathered data in real time. It analyzes conversations and text to help derive contextualized data that will help sales teams make data-driven decisions.

Conversation data from conversation intelligence platforms is useful for sales teams that work in eCommerce, customer experience, and marketing because it helps increase conversions through better buying experiences and customer journeys. This ultimately drives more revenue and increases overall productivity across the organization.

Conversation Intelligence Software vs. Call Tracking Software

Call recording software has been used by businesses for years in an effort to improve business performance. The concept of gathering data from phone conversations has been an industry standard from industries such as contact centers, with the aim of helping agents provide valuable offers and other relevant information to specific customers.

Essentially, call data and analytics are used to provide an overall evaluation of the call experience and the marketing that led to the sales calls. The main difference between call tracking and conversation intelligence is that the former traces the marketing source of the call or conversation while the latter helps make sense of the gathered data, providing insights on customer behavior that will help in the optimization of future marketing campaigns and the overall buyer’s journey.

Conversation intelligence software is integrated with all telephony systems, including video conferencing tools, so that it can transcribe and analyze customer conversations and all customer-facing calls with the help of artificial intelligence platforms (AI).

Conversation Intelligence vs. Revenue Intelligence Platforms

Revenue intelligence platforms differ from conversation intelligence software mainly because it takes a holistic approach and deals with several aspects of sales, including marketing intelligence, deal intelligence, and people intelligence. It helps maximize revenue by going beyond customer conversations and analyzing non-conversational data using AI to obtain richer insights.

In day-to-day use, revenue intelligence works with conversation intelligence but focuses on a variety of use cases instead of one. It puts a focus on deal intelligence and sales in contrast to conversation intelligence software that provides insights that can be used across the organization. However, there are common principles that apply to both concepts, namely:

• marketing automation;
• real-time data for accurate reporting and analytics;
• visibility on all customer interactions; and
• Voice of Customer (VoC) for data-driven decisions.

Why is Conversation Intelligence Important?

Conversation intelligence is a powerful tool that helps sales managers understand each customer interaction and how they collectively lead to sales. It also helps onboarding and training sales team members by guiding sales managers on the appropriate course of action and identifying areas that need improvement.

Ultimately sales reps and the sales team as a whole should be able to predict where specific conversations are heading and how customer interactions will end. They should be trained in methods of ensuring that the customer experience is always positive from start to end. The sales manager and sales reps should be able to address objections quickly and effectively.

Keeping a conversation going naturally while also addressing objections and providing relevant requested information can be extremely challenging, and this is where conversation intelligence comes in. Leveraging AI to facilitate and automate communications increases efficiency by speeding up other processes like prospecting, tracking emails, and qualifying leads.

Below are a couple of areas where a conversation intelligence solution helps businesses.

Personalization

Using AI and conversation intelligence helps make sense of data from sales calls through natural language processing (NLP). NLP is the combination of computational linguistics with statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning models to enable machines to understand and respond to text and voice conversations in a similar way as humans would.

NLP, in turn, helps enhance the overall call experience of customers through personalization. Personalization determines where a call should be routed depending on the customers needs. This is useful because some actions can be done via self service, like quick purchases and online payments, where agent intervention isn’t necessary.

Omnichannel Abilities

Omnichannel marketing is an approach that’s aimed at creating a unified brand message through the seamless integration of multiple channels that are used to interact with customers. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to provide a consistent brand experience for customers, whether they interact with a brand via digital channels or physical stores.

Omnichannel is beneficial for both the brand and customer because it provides several opportunities for fulfillment. Brands can use different channels in combination to provide the best customer experience possible.

Conversation intelligence helps keep the brand message intact by capturing data from multiple channels and providing an understanding of which channels drive the most calls and how to address them.

Conversation Analytics for Better Customer Conversations

Conversation analytics is a process that helps drive conversation intelligence through the evaluation and analysis of customer calls and conversations. It helps decipher the most complicated type of customer feedback—unsolicited, unstructured feedback. This type of feedback includes customer phone calls, chat conversations, social mentions, and third-party reviews.

Below are the main benefits of conversation analytics in conversation intelligence:

• Direct feedback from customers
  These are the customers own words, which means they are honest feedback about your brand.
• Reduced skew on feedback
  Most customers who take the time to provide feedback or reviews are those that have had a memorable experience with a brand, whether positive or negative. Conversation analytics helps balance everything out by gathering data from customer conversations so feedback isn’t skewed to the extremes.
• Reduced burden on customers
  Customers don’t need to lift a finger because feedback is gathered via customer conversations that they themselves initiated. This makes the overall customer journey flow better.

Conversation Intelligence Use Cases

Some companies believe that there aren’t enough use cases for conversation intelligence to be considered an effective business tool, but there are several ways it can be used to help teams be more effective in their jobs.

For Sales Leaders

Training newly hired employees in your sales organization is easier with the help of conversation intelligence software. Capturing and analyzing customer conversations helps identify specific questions, pain points, and other valuable data. Compared to shadowing sales reps, this is a more efficient way of monitoring their performance, with the ability to consolidate conversation insights from a sales rep across every call to help identify patterns.

For Sales Reps

Conversation intelligence platforms are a boon to sales managers and sales reps because it helps create better notes without interrupting the conversation or distracting the customer. The sales team is also provided a detailed summary of relevant points, with the option to add more information to make notes more comprehensive.

For Product and Marketing Teams

Product and marketing teams need to know what customers want and how they want to get them. Conversation intelligence gives these teams the ability to search conversation data for specific key words or phrases so they don’t need to listen to each sales call to get the data they need.

For Ramping Up and Coaching Sales Reps

If you’re managing a team of sales reps, it becomes harder to shadow each of their calls as the team grows. What typically happens is you choose random sales reps to shadow and get data that’s not 100% accurate. Conversation intelligence helps you be on top of what’s happening by having access to the data you need whenever you need it.