When you hear the term “conversational intelligence”, what comes to mind first?
If you’re like many people, you likely think of the chatbots you’ve interacted with on various service websites or your smartphone’s use of voice commands to get you the valuable information you need on demand.
However, while these types of interactions are part of the picture, there’s a lot more to it than that.
Here we’ll go over what conversational intelligence (CI) is really all about. Then, we’ll cover some of the unique ways it can help you grow and streamline your business.
We’ll touch on a few tips for accurately applying conversational intelligence to your ongoing business strategy, as well.
What Is Conversational Intelligence?
Conversational intelligence is a form of machine learning, but it doesn’t stop there.
It also leverages the adaptive abilities of modern artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology to process and interpret nearly unlimited quantities of written or spoken data.
In other words, it’s a business owner’s best friend when it comes to recording, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting the countless conversations their customers may have with sales reps, service personnel, chatbots, and more.
For instance, picture the number of conversations even one of your sales reps or call center employees might have with existing or prospective customers over even a single quarter.
Collectively, those conversations reveal valuable information and important insights into what makes your clientele tick.
They can educate you on what’s really important to your customers, what unique issues they have, and what they’re looking for in a service or product like yours.
But it’s difficult to impossible for even the most competent human analysts to accurately glean every valuable detail from them.
That’s where conversational intelligence comes in.
CI software leverages the efficiency of artificial intelligence to process many hours of calls, chats, text messages, emails, and communications of various types.
It then scans this data for potential topics of interest or keywords you can use to zero in on the most important sections of these communications to analyze them further.
Why Is Conversational Intelligence Important?
There are limits to how much your company can grow when you’re entirely reliant on other human beings to facilitate that growth.
In particular, it’s simply not possible to monitor every rep and every interaction every single time, especially if some (or all) of your employees work remotely.
Plus, even the most intelligent human beings are fallible and will make mistakes from time to time.
Conversational intelligence technology takes what would otherwise be a complicated process that leaves a lot of room for error and simplifies it.
It also saves business owners a small fortune in wasted time, labor, and resources in the process.
Once that occurs, you’re able to facilitate scalable, sustainable, ongoing growth — something every business owner should be shooting for.
What Can Conversational Intelligence Do for Your Business?
Incorporating conversational intelligence into the way your sales, management, and marketing teams operate can definitely save you time and labor.
But that’s not all it brings to the table.
Here’s a closer look at some of the most important ways CI can take your entire business to the next level.
Monitor and assess 100 percent of your communications
When you rely solely on techniques like shadowing to stay on top of things, you’re always going to have blind spots to deal with.
After all, it’s simply not possible for your quality assurance team to supervise every last one of the conversations your sales and service teams have with your customers.
CI technology, on the other hand, can give you that guarantee.
You can rest easy in the knowledge that all of your interactions are covered, recorded, and accounted for, leaving much less room for error.
Save your company a potential fortune in compliance fines
Ensuring your agents are communicating as they should be with your clients is about more than just maintaining a healthy bottom line and a solid customer satisfaction record.
What about situations where a failure to disclose critical information or treat a transaction a certain way opens your company up to penalties, fines, or liabilities?
With CI on your side, you’ll never again have to wonder whether your agents are consistently following protocol.
Instead, you’ll be able to guarantee catching procedural mistakes promptly before they have a chance to cost you money or hurt your company’s reputation.
Identify and meet the needs of individual agents
Conversational intelligence technology takes a lot of the guesswork out of better serving the needs of individual team members.
You’ll be able to quickly and efficiently identify reps that could benefit from additional specialized coaching.
You’ll instantly know who’s knocking their interactions out of the park, as well.
And you’ll not only know who’s doing an above-average job, but you’ll be able to analyze how exactly they’re doing it.
- How are your top agents handling interactions differently?
- What words, tactics, and questions are they using that set them apart?
Once you know, you can ensure all members of your team adopt the same winning approaches.
Gain valuable insights into your customer’s perspective
At the end of the day, your business is really only as good as your understanding of your customers.
So it’s critical that you know what they’re genuinely looking for in products and services like yours.
That means learning as much as you can about what interests them, inspires them, or turns them off, especially when it comes to the companies they choose to do business with.
Adding CI to your quality assurance assessment protocol can shed some light on trends, objections, and topics that consistently come up in their communications with your company.
You’ll find out how they honestly think and speak. You’ll learn what language resonates with them and yields the best results, as well.
How to Apply Conversational Intelligence
Overall, conversational intelligence tech makes meeting and maintaining your quality standards easier, faster, more convenient, and more efficient.
It also leads to a much healthier bottom line by saving you time, labor, and staffing.
Here’s a look at how CI can be used to improve multiple aspects of running your business.
1. Improve your customer service centers
CI software has done a lot to improve the way customers and the companies they trust with their business communicate with one another, and adding it to your business strategy can do the same for you.
For instance, CI makes it possible to offer the superior customer service your clientele wants and expects.
Chatbots can begin complicated interactions with customers before passing each one to the most appropriate agent for completion (if needed).
Bots can also handle simple transactions (like balance checks or information requests) from start to finish, leaving your human agents free to handle more complex transactions.
Combining CI with human contact in this way helps deliver the fast, accurate service that is the hallmark of excellent customer service.
It also makes it easy to collect or analyze valuable data and is easy to scale up or down according to your service center’s needs.
2. Make your sales team more efficient
If you’re serious about making the most of your business, ongoing sales team improvement is an absolute must.
Efficient salespeople are salespeople who know how to close a sale and keep people happy once they’ve officially become customers.
Conversational intelligence tech can help your sales team do both.
CI makes it possible for you to monitor, analyze, and learn from 100 percent of your sales agents’ interactions with your customers.
As a result, you’ll be able to develop a better, more nuanced understanding of what’s really happening between your sales team and your potential customer pool, as well as improve upon it.
You’ll also gain an accurate read on what separates your most successful sales agents from the least successful.
The interactions of high achievers can be studied and leveraged to improve coaching for underachievers.
You can use CI to enhance risk assessment and risk management on an ongoing basis, as well.
3. Provide superior support for your management team
The extensive data CI brings to the table can really help your management team build you a better company.
Yes, you’ll be better able to identify strengths and weaknesses in your various departments, but you’ll also develop a more profound understanding of your customer.
Use CI to identify events, topics, concerns, and issues that matter to your customers and apply them to your services, products, and business strategies to make them stronger.
You can finally get at the “why” behind the choices your customers and team members make and use what you learn to support your business.
9 Conversational Intelligence Tools that are Worth the Investment
Here’s a small but valuable list before we go.
There are many options of CI tools in the market, but you can start investigating these essential 9:
Wrap Up: Keeping Ahead with Conversational Intelligence
The more information and resources you have in your corner when it comes to running your business, the easier it will be to make your company everything you know it can be.
The convenience, affordability, and efficiency of conversational intelligence technology make it easy to streamline your customers’ experience and guarantee them the quality service they deserve.
CI is also great for your marketing team because it helps them to create the best campaigns for your audience.
If you want to know more about the role of AI in marketing, check out our recorded webinar on this subject!
We’ve invited the specialist Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute.
