Top sales and customer service leaders with their pulse on the newest call center technologies and trends are familiar with the chatbot vs. conversational AI debate. While chatbots can be useful in identifying immediate customer needs, to resolve their challenges, a simulated conversation can fall short.
“It’s good to know that technology is being used well,” said Balto Founder and CEO Marc Bernstein in a conversation about how AI has been revolutionizing call centers. “They can be really targeted, smart, and direct. It kind of calls you out to make sure you’re leveling up and being clever and creative in how you’re approaching the game, building those relationships, and thinking outside the box.”
Are you looking to level up your call center success? Let’s explore how conversation intelligence software moves beyond the chatbox to help improve conversion rates, enhance customer retention, and increase ROI.
What Is Conversation Intelligence?
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze speech or text, conversation intelligence software can improve customer experience and boost your bottom line with data-driven insights. Analyzing customer service agents’ conversations in real-time, conversation intelligence pulls back the veil to reveal what your customers truly want — and creates a roadmap that empowers your team to give it to them.
Sometimes the definition of conversation intelligence AI can initially feel very abstract. Let’s start by taking a look at how conversational AI improves QA scores and first call resolution rates.
First call resolution is more than just a buzzword in the call center industry, especially in healthcare, where Medicare funding can be directly impacted by QA scores. The more your call center agents can resolve a customer issue in the first call, the more satisfied the customer will be. Yet, manager requests and escalations are still at about 10% across the industry, which leads to both lower customer satisfaction and QA scores. This is one way where conversation intelligence software shines — by increasing first call resolution rates, you increase the number of happy (and repeat) customers.
When conversational AI is employed in a call center, employees can get a deeper understanding of what it will take to satisfy customers — in real-time, often the first time — by:
- Analyzing customer feelings and intentions to improve agent satisfaction scores.
- Identifying opportunities to improve processes and/or products.
- Enhancing customer profiles and improving personalization to close more sales.
- Empowering call center agents with confidence and higher quality performance.
- Showing your customers that you care more about their needs than your bottom line.
Many tools can help improve call center QA scores, though few are as robust as conversation intelligence. That’s because it brings aspects of the best technology out there, like dynamic prompts, reporting, and speech analytics, into one powerful software solution.
Conversation Intelligence vs. Speech Analytics
While conversational intelligence and speech analytics both employ natural language processing, there are important differences that can impact your call center performance. Take e-commerce, for example. Traditional speech analytics often give call center agents information after the call is completed. While this is still useful, it doesn’t have an impact on the customer in their moment of need, which may lead to product returns or loss of retention.
However, real-time speech analytics, the foundation of powerful conversational AI software like Balto, can guide your reps with live guidance, right in the call, before the opportunity to make a sale or satisfy a customer is lost. Using real-time speech analytics call center agents can improve customer experience with:
- Reduced call wait times.
- Fewer customer service representative errors.
- Up-to-date answers that resolve issues faster.
- Dynamic prompts to improve soft skills like speed, time, tone, mood, and pacing.
It’s easy to see how conversational AI can be a powerful tool for call agents across multiple teams, even with different priorities and goals. But success is still hinged on understanding how best to use, scale, and implement conversation intelligence across all your customer service departments.
How Conversation Intelligence Insights Can Be Used
Nearly all of your company’s revenue-generating departments can benefit from conversation intelligence insights. With real-time guidance, call center agents get live feedback and suggestions. This can be extremely useful for helpdesk and IT reps, who need to troubleshoot an in-the-moment issue that could be impacting important customer situations like video conferencing or remote work. AI technology not only boosts their call performance, but can also enhance other various areas of your business operations.
Marketing
It’s the job of your marketing team to help new customers see how your product or service can help solve their problems and address their pain points. But few marketers get the opportunity to hear the experience your current customers are having — that data stays largely sequestered in the call center. Not so with conversational artificial intelligence software.
Conversation AI allows your marketing team to insert the real words, emotions, problems, and triumphs of your current customers into their campaigns. This level of authenticity speaks more deeply to potential customers. With the help of conversation AI, they can hear how their challenges can be resolved in ways that resonate with their real experiences.
Sales
Your sales teams can use the reporting features of conversation AI software to help coach call center reps who need extra support to improve performance. In addition, the insights gleaned can help them understand what customers need to complete — and repeat — the buyer’s journey.
Customer Service
Increasingly, customers want companies to empathize with them — and some even say that they would purchase more if they felt this way. Because conversation intelligence provides real-time word and tone guidance, your customer service team can approach challenging situations with statements and tones that convey empathy, kindness, and compassion.
Why Conversation Intelligence Is Important
Conversational artificial intelligence gives companies a competitive edge when it comes to sales, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. It can help improve processes, like creating feedback loops between teams and departments. Conversational AI can improve all aspects of the customer experience by:
- Keeping conversations on track and addressing every key point.
- Moving beyond generic sales points by identifying and acting on customer interest.
- Generating a digital sales floor, which gives all call center agents access to the best service techniques.
- Providing feedback on important speech metrics like pacing and ratio.
- Analyzing both the call center representative and the customer to provide real-time guidance.
The opportunities to improve your bottom line with conversation intelligence will only grow as this dynamic technology creates stronger connections between companies and customers. Turning conversations into actionable insights can revolutionize the customer experience in your company.
