Top Benefits of Conversation Intelligence for Your Contact Center

Communication is key to delivering experiences that are beyond comparison.

How you communicate with your customers is a critical part of their experience doing business with you. You are responsible for streamlining customer communication and constantly striving to deliver exceptional customer experience (CX).

Conversation intelligence plays a significant role when it comes to improving interactions. It gives you the real-time insights needed to strategize conversations in a way that gives customers precisely what they seek. This helps improve conversion rates and retention, depending on the team you’re equipping with conversation intelligence. It benefits sales, support, and customer success by collaboratively delivering a CX worth remembering.

Let’s take a deeper look at what customer intelligence means and how it can benefit your contact center.

What Is Conversation Intelligence?

Conversation intelligence analyzes contact center agents’ customer interactions using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Based on this analysis, it delivers valuable insights to your team to improve support and sales processes, helping improve retention rates and close new deals.

There are two types of conversation intelligence tools. The first type offers conversation insights after the call is over, which helps with coaching. The second type provides actionable insights in real time. Usually, there’s some level of overlap between the features of these tools.

Conversation intelligence technology typically includes the following features and functionality:

• Speech-to-text transcription: Converts spoken language into text, making it easier to analyze conversations.
• Sentiment analysis: Uses natural language processing to determine the emotional tone of customer interactions.
• Predictive analytics: Analyzes historical trends and patterns with conversational AI to predict future behavior.
• Agent performance analysis: Gives a detailed overview of key KPIs associated with an agent’s performance, e.g., call handling time or customer satisfaction.
• Topic modeling: Uses NLP to assess if there are any underlying themes or topics in a customer conversation. It groups conversations accordingly.

Conversation intelligence goes beyond basic call recording or transcription. It involves analysis and delivering insights that help you discover improvement opportunities in your business. Since the processes are highly automated, conversation intelligence removes the doubt of human error.

Conversation intelligence optimizes your workflow for efficiency and ensures quality in your customer interactions. It takes you beyond reactive problem-solving and helps you make data-based decisions.

Benefits of Conversation Intelligence for Contact Centers

Customer expectations have grown significantly. Today’s customers expect personalized and efficient service. When businesses constantly raise the bar in service quality, you can’t rely solely on traditional methods.

Conversational intelligence helps you upgrade your traditional call center workflows with actual insights flowing through communication. This solution allows contact centers to offer customers what they want, ensuring greater profitability and sustainability.

Real-time assistance for agents

Suppose Mike is a contact center professional who becomes emotionally exhausted while handling enraged customers. With sentiment analysis, the conversation intelligence platform assists him in answering tricky questions.

In future discussions, Mike gets better clarity of points where the conversation dropped toward dissatisfaction, and he can gradually improve in navigating these conversation pitfalls.

Improved training and onboarding

Conversation intelligence technology highlights areas for improvement and shows situations where your agents particularly excel. This makes it easier to learn best practices in communication, like problem-solving, active listening, and empathy.

It allows you to create interactive training modules for new hires, encouraging them to practice the above qualities actively. The technology provides personalized coaching for every agent, ensuring consistent service quality from the whole team. It also accelerates the learning process for the entire team.

Improved customer satisfaction

Conversation intelligence identifies a customer’s frustration in real time. It helps agents adapt their messaging and approach to offer a better service experience, ensuring customer satisfaction.

Overall, agents can deliver personalized experiences tailored to the customers, helping them build better and stronger relationships. This ultimately helps improve the customer satisfaction score.

Better call resolution rates

Personalized training for agents often results in faster resolution rates. Training has a foundational impact on call center teams and the knowledge transfer process. Conversation intelligence technology plays a crucial role in facilitating this training and coaching.

Based on an Authenticx report, a healthcare business that adopted conversation intelligence experienced a 25% increase in first call resolution (FCR) rate and a 10% decrease in interaction volume.

Increased operational efficiency

Sales reps no longer have to update their CRM for every interaction they have with the customer. Conversational AI works by automatically transcribes the interaction, helping agents operate faster. It reduces the administrative burden, allowing agents to focus on critical tasks.

As a result, agents are more productive. They can now handle larger customer volumes in a given period.

Key Features to Look for in a Conversation Intelligence Platform

When you’re considering a conversation intelligence platform, it’s important to look for these features:

Real-time analytics

A conversation intelligence platform should provide relevant insights, such as real-time topic detection. This lets your agents quickly adapt in conversations and address customer concerns or pain points with a personalized approach.

Suppose a customer mentions a particular keyword from a past purchase. The conversation intelligence tool will quickly show the customer’s purchase history and all interactions related to it, giving the agent context. The tool allows contact center teams to address current issues proactively, saving time and preventing agents from asking repetitive questions.

Sentiment and intent analysis

Sentiment and intent analysis help you understand what your customers feel and why, allowing you to address their issues and reduce churn.

Imagine this scenario: Whitney is a customer who has contacted you over a billing issue and sounds frustrated. Sentiment and intent analysis can flag her call as “negative” and identify the issue as a billing dispute. Your support agent immediately knows her issue and how she feels and can provide a quick and proactive resolution.

Sentiment and intent analysis can also help in the area of social media. For example, if a customer regularly leaves negative comments, sentiment and intent analysis can flag these comments as “negative” and identify the cause of the customer’s dissatisfaction. This allows you to proactively reach out to the customer, help them with their issue, and show commitment to customer satisfaction.

CRM integration

CRM integration is necessary to create a seamless flow of data between systems. It involves connecting your CRM software with other applications such as conversation analytics, accounting, or e-commerce platforms. It also pulls in data from all of these applications, eliminating the issue of scattered data.

You get a better and more unified view of your customer data. CRM integration centralizes data and provides seamless data access across departments, leading to better collaboration. This makes analyzing customer behavior and patterns easier, allowing you to personalize experiences to customers’ needs.

Multichannel support

By integrating phone calls, email, chat, and SMS into a unified platform, you can give your customers a seamless and personalized experience. Multichannel communication support allows your contact center to interact with customers more frequently.

Analyze these interactions to improve customer experience by doing what your customers want exactly the way they want it.

AI-driven coaching

Conversation intelligence systems set up automated check-ins to assess progress and deliver feedback. This allows AI to track individual agent progress and change their training plans whenever needed, ensuring they can move toward their growth goals.

On top of this, conversation intelligence aids skill-based training focused on developing skills that the agent might lack or need to work on. This creates a unique learning journey for each individual while ensuring they get the right advice at the right time. This personalized and relevant coaching allows every agent to reach their full potential.

Call summarization

The conversation intelligence software summarizes sales calls, enabling sales leaders or sales managers to get a quick picture whenever needed. It allows them to get hold of situations and deliver desired outcomes quickly.

Suppose you’re dealing with a frustrated customer who’s tired of speaking to different people on your sales team. The conversation intelligence platform will help summarize the previous sales conversation so you can take the conversation from there. It helps you and the customer save time and move forward rather than discussing the same things again.

Best Practices for Implementing Conversation Intelligence

When you’re ready to onboard the conversation intelligence technology in your contact center, follow these best practices to get the optimal outcome:

Set clear objectives

Outline clear objectives and set goals that will prove successful for the business. For example, “after implementing conversation intelligence, customer satisfaction scores will improve by XX% in the given period.” This metric can be based on what you associate directly with success.

Analyze your customer call data and identify where conversation intelligence can impact most. With the right software, you can track progress in these areas and determine where you want to make more progress.

Engage agents in the process

Transitioning to a new conversation intelligence platform can be tricky, especially if your agents are used to their traditional ways. It’s better to communicate with agents and tell them how a conversation intelligence system will benefit them.

Include them in the training process and help them understand how to interpret conversation analytics and use insights in customer interactions. Make it a rewarding experience for them, and offer feedback to improve their training as needed.

Combine automation with human oversight

Humans have the power of critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and the ability to make ethical decisions — all of which AI lacks. AI complements these qualities by automating routine tasks. Effectively handling issues with conversation intelligence involves collaboration between human oversight and automation.

This is important because it helps your agents handle nuanced situations. Suppose your contact center agent receives a call from a customer seeking urgent customer support. While offering a human touch, you respond to the call, and AI will help gather the context, aggregate the customer’s data, and summarize their previous conversations, if any. This allows the agent to act more efficiently and give customers what they came for immediately.

Regularly review and update insights

Continuously monitor call data and research conversation intelligence data to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. Analyzing call data can help you identify where your agents might be lacking.

This will help you improve support or sales strategies to align your team on set goals and objectives.

Nextiva Helps You Increase Sales and First-Call Resolution Rates With Conversation Intelligence

Nextiva offers a streamlined way to unify conversations from all corners, helping contact center teams create a fluid sales process. One dashboard allows you to interact over multiple channels and avoid frequently switching between numerous conversation mediums.

Nextiva’s unified communication platform has AI, NLP, and conversation intelligence capabilities. It helps you prioritize high-value customer complaints in real time while responding to queries in a way that aligns with customers’ sentiments and intent.

Nextiva does this at a scale. It manages large volumes of interactions without any service interruptions, helping agents achieve peak team performance.

Experience Nextiva in action and explore additional features designed to enhance a contact center’s efficiency and performance.