Your customer experience (CX) interactions are vital to your business. How will you know how your company is performing without them?
However, if you’re dealing with hundreds (or even thousands) of customer interactions every day across multiple channels, it can become impossible to keep track of them.
This makes it tough to extract insights from your engagements and use them to improve your CX.
A lack of actionable customer insights also makes it hard to understand customer needs—which is critical to planning improvements to your products and overall business.
Not ideal, right?
Luckily, with the help of conversation intelligence platforms, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customer calls, emails, and live chats.
This helps to inform your customer service processes and, importantly, how you run your business.
In this article, we’ll unpack conversation intelligence and explore how it can help you:
🏆 Improve your customer experience.
🏆 Boost customer satisfaction.
🏆 Drive improvements across your business.
Let’s get started!
What Is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze all your customer conversations to generate insights automatically.
This means that quality assurance (QA) analysts and managers don’t have to analyze interactions themselves and try to draw insights.
These insights give your business a complete overview of:
- The common issues your customers face.
- How your customers feel about your product.
- What solutions work best to resolve customer issues.
🤔 What’s the Difference Between Conversation Intelligence and Conversational AI?
Conversational AI refers to tools like chatbots or virtual assistants that help customers self-serve by automating frequently asked questions and predictable interactions.
Conversation intelligence is technology—often powered by AI—that analyzes all customer interactions to extract valuable insights to help businesses understand their customers, identify recurring issues, and make company-wide improvements.
How Do Conversation Intelligence Platforms Work?
Conversation intelligence platforms like Loris analyze every customer interaction—whether via phone call, email, or text. It automatically extracts important meaning and insight without the need to read transcripts or listen to phone calls.
The platform analyzes these interactions to understand customer sentiment, which is whether your customers feel negatively or positively about your service and overall brand.
It also analyzes interactions to identify customer issues based on the specific context, not just keywords.
This gives you the real reason customers are contacting you. It does this across all conversations, transforming interactions into metadata at scale.
The platform then generates actionable insights from this metadata that can be used across your business to make improvements that will genuinely benefit your customer.
You’ll see which common issues have the lowest sentiment to track emerging issues you haven’t seen before.
Why you need to analyze every customer conversation
Other customer service tools, like call tracking software, will only provide you with a sample of customer engagements.
These tools often rely on a defined set of keywords as a proxy for things like customer intent and sentiment but lack the context to derive real meaning.
Other conversation intelligence software may provide skewed insights as they are built into specific interaction channels, like a voice or chat platform, which only provides a partial view of your customers.
This misses the nuance that customers may act differently across various channels, but it’s important to see the aggregate to understand the big picture.
For example, the secondary or tertiary issue coming up via email might be a login issue. But if it’s the secondary issue across every channel, that could mean an outage you should prioritize that would otherwise be missed.
This is why a holistic view of all your interactions is important—to see the big issues impacting all your customers and then understand the nuance of each channel, sentiment, and more.
A deeper investigation might reveal that a recent update to your product introduced this login issue. In this case, a combined view makes this obvious, whereas a channel-specific view makes it less clear.
Conversation intelligence insights are invaluable as they can help you make important decisions and improvements company-wide, including:
💡 Product development
If you know which products your customers are contacting you about and if there are recurring issues that correlate to negative sentiment, your product development team has a clear sense of what needs to be improved.
💡 Sales and marketing
With the right insights, your marketing and sales team knows how to position your offering so it resonates with customers. It also ensures your messaging is clear and doesn’t confuse customers, leading to increased support calls.
💡 Customer experience (CX)
Knowing what’s working (and what isn’t) within your contact center can help you better tailor the service you provide to your customers and understand which issues can be easily automated and which need extra human support.
💡 Business policies and processes
If your customers find your policies confusing or difficult to understand, you can use this insight to adjust them. Small changes to the wording and communication of both policy changes as well as timelines can have big impacts.
💡 Business leadership
Management will have more actionable insights that they can use to lead teams better and drive success.
This is especially true when you can tie back the portion of customer inquiries to specific functions within the business to see who owns these issues and ensure they prioritize fixing them.
How to Use Conversation Intelligence to Improve Your Customer Experience
Now that you know what conversation intelligence is, let’s look at how to use it to improve your customer experience.
➡️ Identify customer interactions that matter
AI-powered conversation intelligence platforms help you identify the customer interactions that need your attention.
Conversation intelligence does the work for you, meaning you don’t have to listen to all your calls. Instead, the platform will highlight the conversations where something has gone wrong or needs your attention.
➡️ Spot patterns and trends
AI-powered conversation intelligence platforms can help to identify patterns that are useful in determining:
- Why customers are contacting you.
- Which issues are the most important.
- Which agents may be struggling to resolve complaints effectively.
Without AI, spotting these patterns becomes almost impossible, as it would take (literally) years to analyze all your conversation intelligence data and identify trends yourself.
➡️ Get instant actionable insights
Having a conversation intelligence platform means you get actionable feedback quickly, allowing you to handle emerging issues as they arise.
Collecting customer feedback through a survey, for example, gives you very little hands-on data on how you can improve your CX.
It won’t give you the information you need to take action to fix specific issues or make meaningful changes within your business.
And the participation rate of surveys is so low that you have very limited insight into what your customers actually think.
In our experience, we’ve found that surveys typically reveal that customers are either very happy or very unhappy.
Additionally, you may only get this feedback weeks after the interactions have taken place, meaning you’ll spot issues when it may be too late to fix them.
Let’s say you’re an eCommerce retailer. You notice that you received a high number of inquiries about delayed packages two weeks ago. This led to many of your customers canceling their orders with you—but now it’s too late to do anything about it.
You likely received complaints about this via your support center, but your agents thought each one was an isolated incident.
However, if you use conversation intelligence, your customer experience manager would immediately be able to see that this was a logistics issue affecting multiple customers.
The platform would alert you that you’re receiving multiple calls with keywords related to delayed shipping.
With this knowledge, you could proactively communicate the issue to customers, offer discounts or partial refunds, and even switch carriers to stop this issue from continuing to impact your business.
What Are the Benefits?
There are several advantages of using conversation intelligence within your business:
✅ Enable continuous improvement
Improving your product can lead to more sales conversations. Improving your processes can lead to happier customers. This is why continuous improvement is so important.
The insights you gain from conversation intelligence can help you make more accurate and effective improvements that directly impact business results.
Using the insights you’ve gathered, you can continuously improve your product—and other aspects of your business—to enhance customer satisfaction.
✅ Understand your customers better
Deeper insights mean a better understanding of your customers. If you know what they want, you can ensure you deliver this to them. This can improve customer loyalty and retention, which is solid gold for businesses.
✅ See the bigger picture
When you have all the information, you can make better, more informed decisions. These decisions could include changes to your customer service processes, improvements to your product, or tweaks to your policies.
When you only have a sample of data, you’re making decisions and improvements haphazardly, which could lead to larger issues like product improvements that aren’t well-received.
✅ Drive better quality assurance (QA)
AI conversation intelligence means less manual work for your quality assurance team, like transcribing interactions and scoring agents.
This makes your QA process more effective as analysts and managers will have more time to focus on the customer interactions that matter.
✅ Improve training and coaching
When you have better insights (and when you get them in real-time), you can provide your customer support team with better coaching.
Conversation intelligence helps you identify common mistakes that your agents may make, which can inform your coaching programs.
Agent coaching is essential if you want your team to be able to address customer queries and complaints more effectively and improve CX.
✅ Provide your agents with real-time feedback
A conversation intelligence platform can help provide your agents with real-time feedback and guidance during a live customer interaction, allowing them to tailor their approach depending on customer sentiment.
With Loris CoPilot, agents get the information they need to turn negative sentiment into positive sentiment while on live chats.
Power Your Business with Conversation Intelligence
Your customer interactions should be the foundation of your business—from how you measure success to the fuel for your next great ideas.
The insights you get from these conversations should inform everything from your product development to your agent coaching.
With the right conversation intelligence platform, you can find the conversations that matter, spot trends, and determine how to take action to improve your CX.
Loris is a conversation intelligence platform backed by powerful AI that can provide you with the insights you need to make the most impactful improvements in your business.
By analyzing each and every customer interaction, our platform generates the deep insights you need to make meaningful changes that drive big results.
Speak to one of our experts and see for yourself how conversation intelligence can revolutionize your CX.
