If you are one of the many businesses that rely on inbound phone calls as part of your lead generation strategy, you may have already heard the phrase “conversation intelligence.”
If you haven’t come across that term, or aren’t sure what it means, don’t worry — you’re in good company, because despite being around for years, conversation intelligence is relatively unknown.
Businesses that are already using conversation intelligence to analyze and nurture their inbound leads understand the benefits. But if you’re still on the fence about whether conversation intelligence technology could improve your lead generation and conversion processes, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll break down what conversation intelligence is and how it works, and give a few examples of how businesses are already using the product to drive more leads and streamline their sales strategies.
Defining Conversation Intelligence®
Conversation Intelligence® is an AI-powered tool that automatically records, transcribes, and analyzes phone calls. Businesses use conversation intelligence to speed up the process of reviewing calls and collect valuable data about their sales processes and customer lifecycles.
To access Conversation Intelligence, businesses must already be using call tracking software to monitor and analyze incoming calls. Conversation AI is generally used as an add-on product to call tracking, providing an additional layer of data only available through providers like CallRail.
What data does Conversation Intelligence provide?
From the moment you set up Conversation Intelligence, the tool automatically starts recording and transcribing incoming calls. From there, Conversation Intelligence uses the transcripts it creates to provide a wealth of information.
Using natural language process (NLP), Conversation Intelligence can provide a call summary of the transcript, saving you the time you’d need to spend combing through each word. The software can then provide a number of details about each individual call, such as call sentiment, as well as trends across calls over time.
Let’s take a closer look at how Conversation Intelligence helps businesses improve their lead generation strategies.
How AI enhances customer conversations for businesses
We already know that conversation AI automatically records and transcribes phone calls. But what happens then, and how can it help serve your business?
Efficiently move through entire call transcripts
Many businesses still rely on antiquated methods of navigating call transcripts. They’ll listen to the recording, skipping ahead and rewinding to find one or two nuggets of valuable information among a long, uneventful conversation.
This is a huge waste of time, but fortunately, you can get that time back with Conversation Intelligence. Thanks to the smart transcripts created by the tool, you can easily skim through conversations, significantly cutting down the time it takes to understand the key takeaways of any given call.
Save time digesting transcripts with call summaries and call sentiments
Even with automated transcripts, it can still take a lot of time to read through a script from start to finish. But with Conversation Intelligence, the AI does this time-consuming part of the job for you and provides you with a quick-take synopsis of the call, or a call summary. You can then review the call summaries and determine whether it’s worth diving into the entire transcript or move on, in just a few seconds.
Beyond the summary of the content of the call, you can also gain access to sentiment analysis. The conversation AI will assess the language and tone used on the call, and provide you with details on how both the customer and the sales representative were generally feeling throughout the call.
With these sentiment overviews, you can look for calls where customers or employees seemed upset or agitated, and use these as areas where you can improve your sales training.
Capture relevant words from call transcripts with call highlights
You can learn a lot about a conversation by focusing on the keywords that surface frequently, or at pivotal moments within the call. With Conversation Intelligence this process happens entirely automatically.
You can direct the tool to which words to look out for (more on that later), but with call highlights, your conversation AI software will identify key words and phrases on its own. This can help you then choose keywords to focus on for your PPC or SEO campaigns, and allow you to tailor your messaging to use the same words and phrases that you know your customers are already using.
Qualify and score calls automatically
Imagine if you could look at a call, without having heard it or read the transcript, and know within a few seconds where that individual caller was in your sales funnel.
Using the same NLP technology, call tracking can assign a score to each call that will indicate whether they are ready to convert, or need more time in your nurture sequences. You’ll be able to see each caller’s score within your activity dashboard and the call details page, or you can opt to receive email notifications so you are always in the loop (without being glued to the phone).
Set up rules to trigger automation when specific words are spoken
While Conversation Intelligence will automatically identify important words and phrases through call highlights, you may want to get notifications and analysis around specific words and phrases unique to your industry or sales techniques.
With Conversation Intelligence, you’ll get access to out-of-the-box sets of “rules” that are specific to various industries or tailored to particular use cases. Once you toggle these on, the software will automatically identify the key terms you’ve selected, and from there can automatically categorize them into groups, apply tags based on the key phrases, or assign a value or score to the interaction.
This will allow you to figure out which words and phrases lead to conversions and make it much easier to sort through and analyze your calls based on predefined groups.
How will teams across the organization benefit from Conversation Intelligence?
Conversational intelligence can empower multiple departments throughout the business. Here are the different ways internal teams can use what you learn through conversation AI:
Marketing teams
The key to successful marketing is having a deep understanding of your audience. Demographics and surface details about your audience can be useful, but they pale in comparison to the kinds of insights your marketing team can devise through conversation AI.
On a granular level, marketing teams can see the words and phrases your audience commonly uses, and how their language changes depending on where they are within the sales cycle. They’ll be able to map these common keywords to their paid advertising and SEO campaigns and automatically use the same language their audience is using in messaging throughout their content strategy.
Teams can also use Conversation Intelligence to identify trends throughout their audience:
- What roadblocks are leads encountering along the sales journey?
- What common questions are going unanswered?
- What are the reasons people fall out of the sales funnel?
- What are customers saying about competitors?
- What words and phrases stand out among callers that convert?
Without Conversation Intelligence your marketing team would have to crawl through hand-written notes or recordings one by one or sit through hours of phone calls to get these kinds of insights. With conversation AI, these valuable analyses are delivered to them automatically.
Finally, your marketing team can mine your conversation data to find testimonials and identify clients who would be ideal candidates for case studies. These kinds of marketing assets can be hard to come by—but with conversation AI, marketing teams will have direct quotes from customers popping up on the dashboard frequently.
Product creation teams
Your products and services should be ever-evolving to bring greater satisfaction to your customers. Your product team needs to figure out what customers want quickly, so they can improve their product strategy to retain customers and attract new leads.
Conversation Intelligence gives your product team the agility and speed necessary to keep up with customers’ desires and demands. The tool’s analysis allows the product team to gather specific feedback, straight from the mouths of real customers and leads.
Sales teams
Your sales team may have the most to gain from conversation intelligence, in large part because they are the ones fielding the incoming sales calls, which are then transcribed and analyzed.
Sales managers can leverage the results of conversation AI to assess their teams’ performance. They can learn the precise tactics individual sales representatives employ to persuade leads to convert, then use that as a template for training other members of the team.
Your sales team can also use call highlights to uncover which specific words trigger different responses in leads, then optimize their sales scripts and behavior to encourage more positive interactions that become conversions.
With the right conversation analytics, your team can also see when customers may be at risk of falling out of your funnel. Calls where sentiment is rated as anything less than excellent can trigger a fast reaction from your sales team, where they immediately swoop in to rescue the lead and give them the one-on-one attention they need to stay in your sales funnel.
Customer experience teams
Conversation intelligence doesn’t only help your sales and marketing teams bring in new leads. It’s also a powerful tool for your customer experience team, who can use the data from your conversation AI to find out all sorts of important details about existing customers, including:
- What common questions are customers asking?
- What frustrations are coming up over and over?
- What are the features/services clients desire?
- What technical errors/issues are clients reporting?
- What do customers think of recent product updates or changes in service?
- How do questions change over customer lifecycles?
Your customer experience team can also use Conversation Intelligence to analyze any feedback calls they have. They’ll be able to pluck out testimonials to pass on to the marketing team, or request specific content assets to make their job serving and retaining customers easier.
Integrate your favorite marketing tools with conversation intelligence software
Though Conversation Intelligence can unlock new insights that can transform your business, it’s not the only tool in your marketing suite.
Leading conversational AI providers enable you to integrate with most of the solutions already in your marketing tech stack. You can pull all of your insights into a single dashboard, making it easy to compare all of your marketing channels side by side.
Find out more about Conversation Intelligence integrations here or check out just a few of the most popular integrations:
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- WordPress
- Hubspot
- Bing Ads
AI in action: How Qshark moving company shortened its QA process by 90% with Conversation Intelligence by CallRail
As the LA-based Qshark moving company’s customer base expanded – they faced a serious challenge in the overwhelming volume of calls that needed to be handled professionally. After searching the market for solutions that could help, they put CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence® to work to improve their quality assurance process. With automated call scoring, transcriptions, and the identification of key terms, Qshark was able to streamline its operations and enhance customer service.
Thanks to Conversation Intelligence, the company was able to forego manually listening to call recordings for quality assurance purposes. Instead, they could efficiently scan transcribed texts using keyword searches and call highlights. As a result, Qshark experienced a remarkable 90% reduction in the time spent on call QA. This innovative solution enabled the company to maintain its commitment to excellent customer service. Read the full Qshare case study here.
Get ahead with Conversation Intelligence by CallRail
Artificial intelligence has radically changed the way businesses market themselves. Conversation Intelligence is part of this shift — and businesses that have already adopted it know it gives them a competitive edge, and customer insights that they can’t get anywhere else.
If your business relies on phone calls for lead generation, don’t miss the chance to be part of this revolutionary advancement. Take the first step and start your free trial today.
