An Essential Guide to Conversation Intelligence and How It Helps Improve CX

By Jessica Day

One way to make the customer experience better is to do more. More cold calls, more lead generation, more emails, more key performance indicators (KPIs), more sales talks, more, more, more. But more will only get you so far and a limit is going to be reached at some point.

A better way to improve customer experience? Optimize. Instead of increasing the number of sales calls, ensure that each sale call made is fully optimized and effective in converting to a sale. How do we optimize the conversations we have with clients or prospective clients? We can use conversation intelligence.

The conversations your business has with prospective clients and customers can provide great insights into the issues the target customer has, which of your competitors they are considering, or how to improve your product. But the problem is that that valuable info is either lost right after the conversation or if it was recorded, gathering dust in storage. This is where conversation intelligence comes in.

Conversation intelligence is an example of AI for business intelligence that can help make businesses more efficient and effective.

What Is Conversation Intelligence?

After a customer conversation, important information could be lost due to notes not being taken properly, the call not making it into the CRM system, or the sales rep simply forgetting an important piece of the conversation. 

This is where conversation intelligence can help. 

Conversation intelligence records and analyzes conversations with customers (both sales and support) to help businesses gain meaningful information from those conversations. While conversation intelligence and robotics process automation both use AI they should not be confused. Conversation intelligence software uses AI to “listen” to calls, transcribe them and process them using machine learning and natural language processing. 

Conversation intelligence can analyze conversations for you, take notes of key topics, and allow you to access important moments from the conversations. Businesses can use the insights and information conversation intelligence generates to improve both their sales performance and customer experience.

Uses and Benefits of Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence helps record and analyze customer conversations and helps sales reps and managers easily access important information from those conversations, speed up CRM data entry, and share information between team members.

Conversation intelligence can also help in the coaching and training of new members. Sales managers and coaches can easily listen to the key points of a conversation such as how sales reps answered queries and dealt with customer objections. 

Conversation intelligence doesn’t just record a conversation, it turns conversations into insights that can be valuable to the whole team. If a sales team uses telecommunications like a PBX system to communicate, conversation intelligence can also be used internally to improve team conversations.

Let’s look at how conversation intelligence can benefit different members of a team.

Sales Rep

As a sales rep, you want to build rapport with your clients and potential clients. A good way to build rapport is by improving their customer experience. You want to get feedback from your clients, learn more about them, and the issues they deal with. 

But taking detailed notes and keeping track of every conversation you have with clients, as well as sharing it with the sales team can be very challenging. Having a way to record calls and review them is incredibly handy. Possessing a tool that allows you to easily access key parts of conversations and gain valuable insights into clients is tremendously effective.

By utilizing call recording software, sales reps don’t need to worry about note-taking – they can fully focus on what the customer is saying. By being able to review those calls later, sales reps can understand how the call went, where they did well, and what can be improved for next time.

Sales Manager

A sales manager’s role is to bring out the best in their sales team. A sales manager helps their sales reps reach peak performance.

Conversation intelligence allows sales managers to identify mediocre or poor sales reps and the issues they experience in their customer conversations – all without listening to a single call. The sales manager can then assist the mediocre or less productive reps while at the same getting them to replicate the conversations and scripts of the best sales reps.

This enables the sales team to close more deals and perform better.

Sales Coach

The sales coach role can be really busy and challenging. Sales coaches need to shadow sales rep’s calls and listen to them in detail in order to give performance recommendations. The problem is that this process is not only inefficient, it’s also not scalable.

However, conversation intelligence can give coaches insights and key points in conversations that need attention. This allows sales coaches to better focus their attention and efforts on fixing weak behaviors and replicating winning strategies. 

How Does Conversation Intelligence Help Improve Customer Experience?

We’ve covered how conversation intelligence benefits sales teams but how can it benefit the customer? Customers are turning away from interactive voice response (IVR) systems and instead appreciate interacting with another human.

As pointed out above, conversation intelligence allows sales reps and customer support agents to access key points in customer conversations. From these key points, the sales reps and customer support agents can recall any issues or sticking points the customer or potential client has. Now the agent or rep can adjust the product or service to better address any issues the client has.

The insights gained from conversation intelligence can also identify if there is a poor product-customer fit. Imagine a customer is looking for AI software but is instead offered a host of ai domains. The sales team can then find a better-fitting product for the customer.

These benefits not only help sales close a deal but also improve the customer experience as the customer feels listened to and safe in the knowledge that they’ve been sold the product best-suited to their needs.

Conclusion

Conversation intelligence records and analyzes customer conversations and provides insights and key information gained from these conversations. These insights and key points help not only the sales team but also customers. The sales rep gets to properly listen to the customer and the customer feels heard.

Conversation Intelligence helps businesses stay more customer-centric. This leads to not only better sales performance but also a better experience for the customer.

About the Author

Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business VoIP platform that takes every kind of conversation to the next level—turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns. Here is her LinkedIn.