How Call Intelligence Helps Agents Gain Actionable Insights

Want to hear a secret? The better prepared your call center agents are, the higher the performance levels they’ll reach.

Some call center managers and forward-thinking IT teams might be forgiven for thinking that this means throwing artificial intelligence (AI) at everything and believing it’ll work itself out. Actually, in some edge cases, you might get lucky. For the vast majority, however, selecting exactly what “intelligence” you need is an exercise in itself.

If you’re thinking about becoming an AI call center, the very first thing you must consider is call intelligence.

What Is Call Intelligence?

Call intelligence is a combination of actions and processes that form a package that includes the systematic recording, transcribing, analyzing, and leveraging of phone calls through intelligence features. By providing intricate detail at different legs of the call journey, call intelligence can advise on and action data-driven changes to your call center operations.

Once upon a time, we’d rely on call recording to learn insights about how our calls were handled. Today, we have access to conversational intelligence and advanced reporting. When used together and correctly, these can transform the way you plan staff rotas, inform staff training, and configure call routing.

Why Is Call Intelligence Needed?

When speaking with the CEO of a professional services company, they acknowledged that while their business was successful, they couldn’t perform to its highest potential because the business hadn’t adapted better lead generation methods over the past five years.

In the contact center world, what we don’t know holds us back from achieving greater cost savings, fully understanding our customers, and making changes to our setups before it’s too late.

Specific to call centers, there are significant limitations of traditional call handling methods:

• Difficulty capturing customer sentiment accurately
• Missed valuable insights from unstructured data
• Inefficiencies and wasted opportunities from manual call tracking processes

When using conversation intelligence tools, however, these problems disappear, as we’re turning unstructured data into actionable business insights. Customer calls still happen in the same way. But you get tons more information and support post-event.

As part of the wider conversation about customer intelligence, call intelligence is the first step toward better customer experiences and more efficient call center processes.

Key Insights Call Intelligence Provides to Agents

Customer sentiment analysis

The next golden key performance indicator is going to be sentiment analysis: how do your customers feel?

Imagine the possibilities if you could gauge customer emotions and feelings during interactions.

Not only would you have access to after-the-fact details about how specific agents treat customers and whether your VIP customers are feeling the love, but you would also have in-call notifications flagging when customers are having a bad time. If this is the case, supervisors can listen in and intervene if needed.

The more you do during a call, the lower the chance of a negative customer sentiment.

Team performance metrics

Instead of relying on old-school numeric metrics and manually conducting quality management, lean on agent performance metrics to understand how agents handle calls and where improvement is needed.

With automated scorecards feeding into graphs and trend analysis, you get a snapshot overview of how agents are performing, when their levels dip, and the suggested reasons for doing so.

Rather than learning there’s a training issue or personal problem impacting performance, you can leverage these insights for a holistic view.

Keyword tracking

When there are critical words or phrases (indicating purchase intent or dissatisfaction, for example), you need to know about those conversations. In fact, as an agent, you need to know you haven’t missed those triggers during your current conversation. That’s precisely what keyword tracking enables.

Let’s say your customer says the phrase “higher package” while your agent is troubleshooting a technical issue. That agent’s priority is to fix the immediate problem. And, four times out of five, their goal is to remedy the issue and move on to the next customer.

In the moment, that agent feels like they’ve done a great job. They fixed the problem, the customer is happy, and it all happened within your target resolution time. But, crucially, your business has missed an upsell opportunity. Likewise, if a customer is having a hard time on a call, you might want to set up negative key phrases like “too long” or “I’ve already told you that” to address issues with agent performance or training.

Compliance and risk management

With insights into both live and historical calls, conversation intelligence software makes it easy to spot (and fix) any potential compliance slips.

If you’re in an industry with tight regulations or simply have rigorous internal standards, the analytics and real-time notifications help you get on top of non-adherence to scripts and processes.

Key Benefits of Implementing Call Intelligence

Effective customer insight

The main selling point of any call intelligence solution is that you can now accurately capture and understand customer needs, pain points, and behaviors. There are no more finger-in-the-air predictions, and you don’t have to wait until it’s too late to find out you have an unhappy customer.

Example: Highlighting and analyzing frequent issues helps tailor proactive solutions to reduce recurring calls. If you suffer poor first call resolution (FCR), you can make a real dent by identifying repeat problems caused by a lack of staff knowledge or poor processes.

Enhanced agent coaching and training

When you have a view of which types of queries result in poor customer satisfaction, you can listen back to the automatically flagged recordings (or review the call transcription or call summary) and then review where the problem lies. Once reviewed, you can plan customized training programs for the issues agents need help with.

Thanks to real-time feedback, you can even implement immediate corrections to stop calls from needing escalation to supervisors. You can use examples of good calls as practical training resources, highlighting what good, better, and best looks like in your business.

Increased conversion and revenue

79% of companies now view customer experience as a revenue driver, not merely a cost center. This is due, in no small part, to the correlation between happy customers and repeat customers. Ultimately, if a customer is happy with your service — and you give them no reason to shop elsewhere — the chance of renewal is greater.

On top of providing a great customer journey, a conversation intelligence platform can highlight successful sales strategies so you can replicate them across teams. For example, if it becomes clear that proactive follow-ups result in increased sales, you’ll want to roll that out across other departments.

Even something as simple (to customers) as intelligent call routing can save time and improve the customer experience. The more intelligence you have on how your agents and calls are performing, the more optimizations you can put in place.

Improved marketing campaigns

Like with sales calls, you can derive marketing insights directly from customer interactions through customer intelligence software.

Using the conversation analytics generated during calls, you can refine marketing strategies and messaging, increasing engagement and proving your return on investment. Be it telemarketing, sales follow-ups, or cold calling marketing campaigns, if there’s a call being made, there’s data being produced.

For multichannel campaigns, you can even measure activity and performance per channel. When running an omnichannel contact center, you increase the likelihood of lead generation and the number of data points per prospect.

Elevated customer experience and satisfaction

Armed with data and insights about your customers, you can provide personalized experiences by anticipating customer needs. For example, if you know the incoming call is from a customer who’s been sent their first invoice, you can load this ready and ask if this is the reason for calling.

Likewise, if a customer has made a new purchase, your phone system can load these details so there’s no delay when your customer explains their reason for calling. When you have these insights to hand, expect to improve FCR, thereby enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Best Practices for Implementing Call Intelligence

We know that 86% of businesses report that customer interaction data is dispersed across multiple systems, creating data silos. Breaking down call data silos and funneling them into a single pane of glass helps everyone in this process.

To instigate this massive help, abide by these best practices:

Define clear objectives

Implementing call intelligence is worthless if it’s not aligned to a goal. Ask yourself, your sales managers, and your wider team what they wish to achieve by implementing such functionality.

Goals often include:

• Improving sales conversion
• Reducing average handle time
• Increasing campaign effectiveness
• Reducing churn/increasing retention
• Providing a better customer experience (which may be measured in a number of ways)

Prioritize agent training

Train agents to effectively utilize insights from the software from day one. There’s no reason to hold fire once you’ve started collecting data.

If you have a bona fide rationale for making changes to your process, call flow, or scripts, don’t hesitate. Make sure users (and supervisors) know how to use real-time information for the better.

Leverage automation

Once your data establishes clear trends or patterns, you can automate routine analysis to save time and resources. It’s no longer best practice to wait for a human to interpret the data with hours worth of Excel spreadsheets. Build triggers and approvals to enable new workflows when the data suggests change is needed.

Be it automated phone calling, a more efficient interactive voice response system, or flags for agent training, use automation to make your life easier and your business more productive.

Establish a testing phase

With any form of new technology, it’s advisable to test it before you unleash it on your business. With AI-type technology, you’re under even more scrutiny to prove its worth from day one.

So do that!

Introduce your call intelligence solution in phases, allowing feedback and change before full implementation. Work out any niggles and set up any integrations you may need ahead of time. Using a focus group of power users, iron out the creases ready for go-live time with lesser technology-savvy teams.

Continuously collect and apply feedback

With any change to a contact center, you must approach with a view for continuous improvement. You can make one positive change today, but what if you learn a ton from that change and can multiply that benefit by five next time? And what if the platform (via machine learning) becomes smarter thanks to the data you feed it?

Once live, intelligence helps you out so you don’t need to do the deep dive yourself. With first-hand data, you’ll get a clear view of how your changes are performing compared with historical metrics and volumes.

How Nextiva Provides Real-Time Call Intelligence

When striving for genuine call intelligence, you need a contact center platform that pulls from all sources and generates a holistic view of your entire operation.

Nextiva achieves this in a number of ways:

• Seamless CRM Integration: Easily access and leverage call insights directly from CRM systems, simplifying workflows and enhancing productivity.
• Omnichannel Call Intelligence: Nextiva’s integrated platform provides insights from phone, email, live chat, and social media, giving a unified view of customer interactions.
• AI-Powered Real-Time Analytics: Call center analytics inform actionable insights like call sentiment, customer intent, and keyword occurrences.
• Scalable Solutions for Any Size Business: Nextiva scales with your business needs, from small sales teams to expansive contact centers, maintaining high sales performance.
• Enhanced Compliance and Security: Secure, reliable call recording and analysis adhere to compliance requirements.
• Dedicated, Award-Winning Customer Support: Nextiva’s outstanding customer service supports seamless implementation and continuous operational excellence.

Is call intelligence on your contact center road map?

Get started with Nextiva Contact Center today.