Your phone calls with customers are your business’s greatest untapped resource.

As a business owner or manager, you might find yourself interacting less with your customers day-to-day and getting disconnected from their desires and pain points. Or you may be in a position where you’re interacting with customers constantly, answering dozens of phone calls a day and fielding a variety of questions and concerns.

Yet all that information translated on phone calls can be lost as soon as you hang up the phone. How can you record the helpful insights about what customers are *really* calling about that should be translated to your larger organization?

What is conversation intelligence?

In short, conversation intelligence refers to the ability to identify and react to signals in verbal communications. 

Most business owners are already capturing data around their customers, such as a customer’s purchase or visit history, their referring advertisement or URL, etc. Yet gathering deeper insights from the actual spoken conversations your team is having with prospects should be an essential piece of that puzzle. 

Conversation intelligence tools allow you to do just that. With these solutions, such as call tracking tools, you can capture your customer communications through call recordings, transcriptions, scoring, and more, you’re able to revisit your conversations and mine them for information about what your customers want and need. 

Insights such as these empower you and your team to make decisions around how you can better serve your customers, while also improving internal processes to achieve your unique sales or business goals.

A closer look at CI tools

Conversation intelligence (CI) software enables you to review your customer communications for common trends and patterns around frequent questions, pain points, and desires. Using tools like call recordings, call transcriptions, call scoring, and keyword detection, you’ll be able to isolate data for words spoken on a call, customer sentiment, length of the call, time to conversion, and more. 

And when you combine conversation intelligence with tools that can automate actions based on details from the call, you’re able to eliminate unnecessary manual tasks for your team and reduce the overall time to conversion. 

Conversation analytics platforms typically use the following tools to capture conversation intelligence: 

• Call recordings: Record the audio of your calls.
• Call transcriptions: Transform the audio of your calls into speaker-organized scripts.
• Call scoring: Score your calls based on criteria unique to your business, such as identifying high- vs. low-quality leads.
• Keyword detection: Automatically detect when specific words are spoken on a call.

These tools are key for revisiting conversations with customers long after they’re over and tracking sentiment over time. 

Creative ways to use conversation intelligence across industries

No matter what field your business is in, if you’re interacting with customers, patients, or clients, you will likely benefit from utilizing conversation intelligence tools. CI is a powerful resource for sales and support teams alike.  Managers can use call recordings and transcriptions to train new team members on how to interact with customers, or to revisit tricky conversations and help coach staff on ways to improve.

Scoring calls is also an essential component of conversation intelligence—it’s what translates a phone call into a meaningful data point for your organization. Scoring calls helps you isolate whether the contact is a high- or low-quality lead, or pinpoint criteria such as “repeat customer” or “interested in [product/service]” so you can track interest and volume of calls about certain aspects of your business or promotions. 

You can monitor those customers and reach back out to hot leads accordingly in order to increase your conversion rate, versus wasting time on prospects that are less qualified.

Being able to detect when specific words are spoken on a call is also a critical piece of conversation intelligence. For example, with a keyword spotting tool  you can monitor if and when the word “cancel” is spoken by your customer, and how your team is able to respond to that. 

Do you find that your customers are canceling your product or service at a particular time of year, or in response to change? Are calls that mention the word “cancel” taking up your internal resources, with talk lengths lasting greater than 10 minutes? Having these data points can help you make actionable decisions for your business, such as giving customers an option to self-cancel if churn-related phone calls are occupying too much of your team’s time. 

In addition, not only should your CI provider be able to categorize calls around keywords, but it should also trigger actions based on them. Specific keywords should assign appropriate tags to calls, send emails/notifications, or exclude insignificant calls from your reporting. 

CI can power your organization

When you’re able to turn your conversations into actionable takeaways, you unlock your business’s potential for growth. Since you and your team will have a deeper understanding of your customers through conversation intelligence, you can use those insights to improve the quality of your conversations with customers and to achieve your unique goals. Your team will be empowered with the knowledge and tools to tackle any sort of interaction and truly support your customers.

Interested in learning more tips for your team? Check out our business development learning hub for a wide range of resources to get you started.