Conversation Intelligence is the process of analyzing a conversation, whether in text, an audio file, or a video file. The key is taking dialogue and understanding its meaning to inform decision-making. A wealth of knowledge in conversations often goes unused because organizations don’t have the tools to study it.
Consider customer service exchanges. Some are audio, such as calls to your service center. Others use functions like chat. These exchanges contain a lot of information that can boost sales or assist marketing. The problem is that because of the large volume and unstructured nature of these “conversations,” it takes great effort to capture and understand how they provide information for process improvement. Conversation intelligence fixes this problem.
The ability to derive meaning from conversations includes information that can assist people in their jobs. As with any analytic process, the tools you need and the technology you use depend on the questions you are trying to answer and the decisions you’re trying to make. The technology must fit the problem.
This article explores the available features in conversation intelligence use cases, and how Symbl.ai make its easy to implement conversation intelligence in your organization.
Leveraging Conversation Intelligence Technology
Conversation intelligence must work in all the conversational channels of your business – whether files (audio, video, or text), streaming video, or by phone. It must connect easily to capture all of your relevant communication channels. You need a platform that connects through APIs or SDKs to capture your conversations and incorporate them into your applications.
Once you have captured a conversation, you want the ability to determine the features of the conversation. These features go beyond speech-to-text, selecting the topics, topic hierarchies’ scope, and conversation sentiment.
There is also valuable analytics beyond content to help you understand and act on conversation intelligence. These include:
- Talk time and speaker ratio — the total time and percentage of total time used by a given speaker.
- Silence — the time when none of the speakers was saying anything.
- Pace — the speed, in words per minute, that a person spoke.
- Overlap in conversation — the percent and total time a speaker spoke over another speaker.
Each of these elements indicates the dynamics of the conversation. For example, suppose the conversation was between a new salesperson and a potential customer. In that case, these statistics could assist in coaching the salesperson to listen more or not talk over the customer.
To understand this information, you want to identify the entities and intent of the conversation: who participated, the company, location, and role in the conversation. This information adds another layer of understanding to the conversation intelligence statistics.
How Does Conversation Intelligence Inform Sales, Marketing, E-Commerce, and Customer Experience Strategy?
Conversation intelligence provides the information needed to improve the variety of interactions your business has. While sales and marketing effectiveness measures tell you the results, conversation intelligence provides insight into the all-important “why” and gives you the information you need to improve the process. Listening to customers rather than just talking to them can make a huge difference in sales. Conversation intelligence provides the information to improve your processes.
Let’s dive into a few examples.
Sales
Conversation intelligence allows you to analyze call performance in real-time and understand critical events in the conversation. You can determine the reason for calling and the handler’s response if it is an inbound call. Understanding why customers are calling allows you to see product defects or areas of customer disappointment.
Are the call center employees adhering to the script? Areas of the script that result in silence may need to be adjusted. Are your employees not listening and talking over the customer? Are there places in the call where the customer gets annoyed (negative sentiment)? Understanding these call details can help you improve your call center processes and retain customers.
Every sales team has its top performers. The question is what they’re doing differently than the average salesperson. Collecting and analyzing conversation intelligence information using a tool like Symbl allows you to understand the conversational strengths of your top salespeople and compare them to the rest of the team, increasing revenue and sales intelligence.
What are their talk topics, duration of the call, and talk-to-listen-to ratios? This information can detect behavioral differences and provide coaching points to improve the entire team’s performance. You can also use conversation intelligence to track and compare changes in performance, thereby validating the coaching effectiveness.
Sales conversations change over time. For example, what effect does a new market competitor have on your sales? Conversation intelligence lets you know when new topics change your sales conversations, allowing you to react. In the case of a new competitor, you want your salespeople to have a ready answer to challenges rather than responding with silence. You can uncover new factors affecting your sales by analyzing the topic and concern trends.
Marketing
Conversation intelligence also has applications in marketing. Understanding a competitor’s approach to the market can help shape your marketing messages. You can apply conversation intelligence to analyze the content of competitors’ webinars, and by using topic identification, you can understand the messaging your competitors are using. By analyzing the content of the QA session, you can pick up on the listener’s areas of interest and concern.
If you use focus groups or have conversations with key customers, you can use conversation intelligence to identify win and loss factors and areas of customer empathy. With Symbl, you can use conversation intelligence to identify trending topics across various conversational forms, whether social media, chat, webinars, or customer service. Symbl supports conversation intelligence for events, webinars, and even social media apps. These all have data you can analyze to reveal trends, areas of concern, or general questions.
For example, are comments on a new product trending positive or negative? Is the community asking for more information, such as details on features or buying options? Are there complaints that you must address? Conversation Intelligence’s ability to capture and analyze the social media conversation provides vital insights to improve marketing and sales.
E-commerce
Many of your e-commerce applications have your customers complete the entire transaction online. Sometimes they feel they have to talk to someone over the phone to get the necessary information to complete the sale. In other cases, they abandon their transaction and go to a competitor. Conversation intelligence can provide insight into what happened.
E-commerce transactions generate a high volume of conversational information, including inquiries about product features, requests, or complaints. With a conversation intelligence tool like Symbl, you can increase revenue and sales intelligence by analyzing customer interactions with the website as a conversation. Additionally, you can use conversation analytics on the large volume of transactions to determine customer sentiment, identify areas of high customer interest, or interpret other feedback generated by the transaction.
Customer Experience
Customer experience includes all aspects of a customer’s interaction with your enterprise, including everything from product quality and ease of use to advertising, sales, and customer service. You can view them as aspects of having a conversation with your customer, and every interaction provides a way to capture a customer’s present and future business.
The impact of conversational intelligence is not just in its ability to improve sales or customer service interaction alone. It’s about improving the customer experience.
For example, by analyzing a customer service call from a customer experiencing an issue, you can determine its root cause, such as an unclear instruction. By correcting the instructions, you can remove the need to call and thereby improve customer experience.
Conversation intelligence provides information that can improve the performance of the individuals involved in the conversation and remove the root cause of the problem. Using a tool like Symbl to boost your strategy helps to create a more robust customer care response.
Taking Your Conversation Intelligence Strategy to the Next Level with Symbl.ai
You can implement all the capabilities and conversation intelligence use cases mentioned above by using Symbl.ai. Symbl.ai gives you the complete package, from connectivity to analytics. It provides developers with the tools to embed conversation Intelligence into your applications and boost your business. Symbl.ai has a wide range of APIs and SDKs, making it easy for developers to convert audio, video, or chat data. Tools within Symbl.ai take this data and provide you with summaries, intents, topics, and sentiments that you can incorporate directly into your applications. Symbl.ai uses artificial intelligence models to give the context-awareness necessary to understand a conversation.
Conversation Intelligence requires connectivity to various sources, the algorithms to understand it, and the tools to act on it. Symbl.ai allows you to embed conversation intelligence into your existing applications easily. For more information, visit Symbl.ai and create a free trial account.
