You’re Listening, But Are You Really Understanding? Embrace Conversational Intelligence

In a call center, about 120 words get exchanged between you and the customer in a minute. Assuming that you are on call for 180 minutes every day, you are talking about 21600 words per agent. Assuming that there are 50 agents, you are looking at 10,80,000 words per day.

As an agent, you would remember how your customer behaved during the call, but you don’t have the time to document all of it before you handle the next call. Probably, you knew the customer was happy or unhappy about something very specific or neutral during the call.

Besides these, you also have to account for other channels like email, web, chat, SMS, mobile, and social. Now, you are talking Terabytes of data, which probably has funds of information that would help you do your business better and improve the customer experience.

At the end of the day, it is next to impossible to remember every customer conversation and document the key elements of the call. 

This is where conversational intelligence comes into play. Let us take a moment to define conversational intelligence in the context of a call center.

What Is Conversational Intelligence?

Conversational intelligence is a set of tools that can analyze the humungous amount of data that your cloud call center generates through customer interactions. This analysis will help you make informed decisions for your business.

With conversational intelligence, you can understand the negative, positive, and neutral sentiments of the customers and the likely reasons for them. It can even read between the lines, look at intonations in speech, the pauses, and typical words used by the customers, and make sense of it to improve customer service, boost revenues, and improve operational efficiency.

Often, businesses run post-call surveys to understand the voice of the customer, but the problem with this approach is that not many people fill out the surveys. However, you already have a goldmine of information as recorded interactions that can provide you with honest customer opinions about your products, services, and the overall brand. 

We always talk about customer sentiment, but what about agent sentiment?

Agent Sentiments Are Key In a Conversation

Agent sentiment is equally important in customer interaction.

• Is the customer calling you back because of a recurring issue, or was the agent rude?
• Was the agent misselling the features of your product or service?
• Did the agent comply with the regulations and standards that your industry demands?

All of these are red flags that can be pulled up by conversational intelligence. These can act as inputs for the training and coaching of the agents.

How Does Conversational Intelligence Work?

Let us assume you are looking at Terabytes of data, and how do you go about analyzing them for the benefit of your business?

Conversational intelligence will look for specific keywords and phrases inside your conversations and categorize them.

It can be competitor mentions, delivery delays, or order cancellations. Based on your needs, you can configure conversational intelligence to look for specific keywords or phrases.

For instance, if you want to understand why there is an increase in order cancellations, you can pull out all the conversations that are tagged with order cancellations. Then, as a team, you can analyze those calls to understand the reason why there is an uptick in cancellations. This would allow you to act on it and reduce the number of cancellations in the future.

Let me give you an example.

One of our healthcare customers was receiving an enormous number of calls to the front desk to set up appointments. While they had that feature on their website and their mobile app, patients weren’t using them.

We analyzed all their interactions with conversational intelligence and understood that the website and the mobile interface for appointment setting were tacky, and patients didn’t feel comfortable using them.

So, the provider changed the interface for a better user experience, and patients started booking appointments using them. We also integrated their IVR software system with the appointment booking app.

This considerably reduced the number of calls that the front desk received regarding appointment booking.

Is Compliance a Big Use Case for Conversational Intelligence?

All along, either the supervisors or managers were tasked to listen and grade the agent’s performance.

They listen to calls, and they take time to manually complete the scorecards and look at all the compliance issues like:

• Did the agent say, ‘Thank you for calling.’
• Did the agent provide his name and introduce himself and the company?
• Did the agent give the disclaimer that this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes?

All of this is done manually. It takes a long time, and it is a tedious process. Any manager would be able to analyze two to five agent interactions, and beyond that, they don’t do.

With the limited analysis, you wouldn’t know what’s happening in terms of adherence and compliance.

With conversational intelligence, you will be able to transcribe 100% of the calls, and with sentiment analysis, you will have full visibility into agent performance.

This would save you tons of money and avoid any human bias that may creep into the system.

How Do You Ensure Customer Privacy with Conversational Intelligence?

During an interaction, the customer may be asked to give out information like date of birth, credit card information, mother’s maiden name, and other sensitive information.

These are data that need to be protected and, hence, cannot be a part of the recordings. Conversational intelligence comes with data redaction tools that remove all of this sensitive information from the recordings and transcripts, which ensures the privacy of customer information.

Why Is Conversational Intelligence Important in a Contact Center?

It directly impacts customer experience, agent performance, and business outcomes. Some of the key reasons why it matters include:

• Conversational intelligence helps agents understand intent, emotions, and sentiment, making interactions smoother, personalized, and more engaging.
• Agents can anticipate issues and provide faster resolutions by analyzing past conversations and identifying patterns.
• Reduces call transfers and follow-ups, improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
• It can coach agents in real-time, suggesting better responses based on past successful interactions.
• Reduces agents’ training time by providing them with context-aware assistance. Besides, it offers personalized coaching recommendations based on tone, speech pace, and engagement level.
• Understanding a customer’s sentiment and past interactions enables proactive retention strategies and identifies upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
• Monitor calls for regulatory compliance and alert supervisors of any deviations.
• It can summarize calls, highlighting key issues, resolutions, and next steps. This reduces after-call work and improves average handling time.
• Automatically detects key phrases like late delivery, billing issues, or cancellation requests and helps businesses identify recurring pain points.
• Identifies customer sentiment using voice tone, word choice, and speech patterns. This would help managers pinpoint moments of frustration or delight without reviewing calls manually.
• Detects early warning signs of customer dissatisfaction like repeated complaints and cancelation hints. This would allow you to follow up proactively before the customer churns.

A Gartner study reports that businesses that implement conversational intelligence in their contact centers see a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 40% increase in agent productivity.

According to McKinsey, organizations that leverage conversational analytics reduce customer churn by up to 30%.

Forrester reports that 68% of customers say they’ll stay loyal to companies that provide consistent and personalized interactions.

In essence, conversational intelligence transforms a contact center from a reactive service hub into a proactive customer engagement powerhouse. It ensures every interaction is efficient, empathetic, and outcome-driven.

You don’t have to rely on random call audits and gut instinct. You can look at conversational intelligence to coach agents, refine customer service strategies, and proactively solve issues.

The future belongs to those who listen to conversational intelligence. This is a shift that you should make right now.