What is Conversation Intelligence? 4 Ways It Empowers Call Centers
Call centers receive sales, customer support, and customer care calls/emails/chats daily, generating substantial amounts of valuable data. This data contains crucial insights like customer sentiment, product feedback, questions, competitor comparisons, customer objections, feedback, and more.
If a call center generates only a few tens or hundreds of calls, you might be able to review each call and help improve agent responses and call outcomes. Similarly, if agents receive such few calls, they might have the time to deliberate on each query, find an appropriate answer, and generate better call outcomes.
However, everything changes when calls occur at scale. How do agents come up with answers within seconds? How do they search vast amounts of data to find the correct solution with multiple calls in the cue waiting for them? What happens when your business cannot analyze and surface insights from the tens of thousands of data points generated from your call center?
The solution lies in a relatively new technology called conversation intelligence.
Definition: What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence combines artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) – or natural language understanding (NLU) for the most advanced form of NLP– to analyze vast amounts of data from calls, emails, and chats and generate data-driven insights.
Its applications vary depending on the use case, but most fall into three broad buckets: analytics, agent enablement, and workflow automation.
Analytics:
Conversation Intelligence systems use different flavors of AI to process customer interaction data across voice calls, email, and chat and generate actionable insights. For example, Level AI uses NLU to process this information in real-time and create data-driven insights like call volume trends per call reasons, agents’ performance scores per call reasons, missed opportunities, and areas of improvement that can boost agent performance without 1:1 human coaching, CSAT per conversation topic, etc.
Agent enablement:
Conversation intelligence empowers agents to have the correct information at the right time to generate better customer interaction outcomes. For example, Level AI connects to all your knowledge resources through integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Drive, and others, surfacing proactive hints that help agents provide the correct answers in real-time.
Workflow Automation:
Conversation Intelligence enables the optimization of call center operations. The AI detects an agent struggling, it triggers an alert to a supervisor. Quality assurance teams also benefit tremendously from efficiencies generated via the conversation intelligence engine: compliance nonadherence gets automatically assigned for review to the quality assurance auditor in charge. Call center coaches get automatically assigned calls and agents review and coach on a particular agent behavior that could benefit from improvement.
How Does Conversation Intelligence Work?
We’ve looked at the ‘what” of conversation intelligence, but what about the ‘how’ of conversation intelligence?
What data does Conversation Intelligence analyze, and how does it deliver insights?
Conversation Intelligence platforms like Level AI leverage a branch of NLP called natural language understanding (NLU) to ‘understand’ all the information from your call center. The platform then applies AI to turn this processed data into relevant, timely, and impactful insights.
For a more in-depth explanation of NLP, NLU, and a third branch, NLG please refer to our blog post here.
Conversation Intelligence Use Case: 4 Ways Level AI’s Conversation Intelligence Platform Empowers Call Centers
1. Automates and Scales Quality Assurance
Call centers rely on QA to strengthen the support team, improve the customer experience, refine business processes, and hit business goals. However, QA often finds it challenging to achieve this because of a staggering amount of data, poorly processed data, lack of time to analyze calls, emails, and chats at scale, and limited agent coaching resources.
Level AI utilizes conversational intelligence to empower contact center QA teams to monitor and evaluate agent conversations automatically, making them 5X as efficient with 2X the accuracy of legacy systems. By leveraging NLU and AI, Level AI allows QA teams to review 100% of agent conversations, up from the industry standard of just 1-2%, providing your contact center with new opportunities for top-quality customer service.
2. Delivers Critical Analytics
Omnichannel call center performance analytics can become a single source of truth, but only with the right tools. For most companies, data from voice, emails, and chats remain untapped due to a lack of tools to consume this information at scale and generate actionable insights. In many cases, companies tap only 1-2% of this data, often drawing biased and incomplete conclusions.
Level AI’s analytics features provide a unified view of everything happening in your contact center with native dashboards and custom reports for QA teams and agents.The power of Level AI’sconversation intelligence framework enablescall center agents and teams to see what’s working and what can be improved. Using the platform, agents and team leaders can generate custom reports and voice of customer insights and integrate with other tools like Power BI and Tableau to further extend generated insights.
3. Offers Real-time Agent Assistance
In most companies, call center agents require onboarding training, rely on disparate information sources, and use keyword-based searches to find information. These processes work, but not at an optimal level. The result is unacceptably high inaccuracies, extended onboarding timelines, and the need to update agent playbooks constantly.
Level AI accelerates agent onboarding, surfaces 2X more accurate information in real-time and enables autonomous learning for support agents. By connecting to all your data sources, including CRMs, knowledge bases, solution centers, and help centers, Level AI utilizes NLU to understand customer intent and provide agents with guidance using your best resources for each scenario.
4. Unlocks Powerful Agent Coaching
Agent coaching can be a resource drain to your call center for the following reasons:
- It takes much time to prepare agents to perform at an exceptional level
- Coaching eats into contact center productivity because it takes agents and team leaders away from their duties
- Coaching, through 1:1 sessions and other linear processes, is difficult to scale.
Level AI gives quality assurance analysts a dedicated space to track individual agent performance, identify improvement areas, and build customized coaching plans, all at scale. The Level AI Agent Coaching module enables contact center quality coaches to analyze agent performance, identify gaps, set up action plans, select customer conversations for review and coaching, schedule coaching sessions, track progress, and more — all from one place.
What Are the Benefits of Conversation Intelligence To An Organization?
Conversation intelligence provides a myriad of benefits to organizations across the entire call center performance matrix, including:
Delivering insights at scale
Conversation intelligence platforms provide customer insights at scale, including customer sentiment, tone of voice, leading objections, and NPS scores. They offer a ready way to capture, analyze and deliver real-time insights across multiple channels like voice, email, and chat.
Conversation intelligence also provides data on agent performance so you know how effective your agents are and what areas can be improved.
The outcome of getting insights at scale is a reduction in agent inconsistencies, elimination of glaring errors, and deeper insights that can inform data-driven decision-making. Companies that use conversation intelligence significantly improve processes, products, services, and messaging.
Improving behaviors at scale
Agent behavior is a crucial performance metric in call center operations. However, collecting such data with no way to implement it is an exercise in futility.
Conversation intelligence platforms analyze agent behavior and provide recommendations on what to say, actions to take, and how to coach an agent to get better outcomes.
Besides surfacing hints on what information solves a customer’s issue, such platforms can also recommend actions like improving empathy, requesting the correct information, and cross-selling products that might better meet a customer’s needs.
Increasing conversions
Call center conversion rates are directly proportional to how well agents understand customer intent, the actions they take, and the information they share.
Conversation intelligence gives agents an edge by helping them fine-tune their actions while streaming relevant content from organization-wide information sources pertinent to each conversation.
The result is better-targeted information delivered through optimized processes, contributing to higher conversion rates.
Accelerating your revenue engine
Conversation intelligence is an optimization technology that improves your agents’ ability to preserve and drive revenues.
Better coaching, higher quality support information, and improved agent performance feed into higher call center performance.
With conversation intelligence software like Level AI, your agents can close more deals, increase customer loyalty, resolve issues faster and avert costly cancellations, all of which act as well-greased cogs in your revenue engine.
Transforms customer experience data into usable assets
Calls, emails, and customer chats are a gold mine of helpful information.
Unlike market research and other outbound market intelligence strategies, with these channels, customers are telling you exactly what they like and don’t like about your products and services, what their pain points are, and, in some cases, what will make them happy.
Taking this information and turning it into actionable insights is a significant opportunity for companies, and conversation intelligence helps unlock it.
Automates agent onboarding
It’s no secret that agent onboarding is a significant bottleneck for call centers. Agents must learn everything about your products and processes and go through extensive coaching to bring them up to speed with other agents.
Conversation intelligence platforms shorten this process significantly by providing agents with self-learning and evaluation tools, automated agent feedback, and real-time hints on what information best fits a specific scenario, reducing the need for 1:1 coaching and time-consuming onboarding processes.
Who Can Benefit from Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence isn’t just for call centers. Other departments can benefit from it equally as much. Here’s how conversation intelligence can help customer experience, sales, product, and management.
Customer Experience
Customer experience success (including customer success, customer care, and customer support) hinges on understanding customer sentiments, leading customer issues, NPS scores, and other customer-generated data.
However, it’s not enough to have insights about the tip of the iceberg, as is usually the case.
Customer experience teams must be able to analyze 100% of customer data to surface data that bridges the gap between what the agent does and what the customer expects.
With Level AI, customer experience agents can leverage conversation intelligence to address inquiries better.
Sales
Sales teams are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of conversation intelligence because they primarily rely on customer data to win more deals.
A conversation intelligence platform supports sales teams by accelerating new rep onboarding, increasing sales rep productivity, transforming customer data into deal-winning insights, improving rep coaching, and providing real-time rep support.
Sales reps can use the insights a conversation intelligence platform generates to ask the right discovery questions, know how to counter common objections, offer accurate product and pricing details, and present compelling competitive differentiators.
Product
Product teams can always benefit from more customer data that tells them how to improve products, offer better onboarding, and create more precise documentation.
Where outbound information-gathering efforts like surveys have limits, customer-generated content offers a unique insight into what customers say about a product.
Conversation intelligence software unlocks these insights, providing product teams with concrete data about the overall customer experience.
For example, if customers routinely complain about a missing feature, it might point to an opportunity to offer better utility by adding the feature.
Management
Management routinely makes decisions based on available data. However, such data is often limited to what various departments collect, analyze and present.
Conversation intelligence tools add a crucial data stream to management’s data pool, bringing in customer sentiment, voice of customer, NPS scores, and more.
With this extra information, managers can make decisions incorporating the totality of customer data, not just the fractional samples typically used.
In this way, conversation intelligence acts as management’s window into what customers say, a vital link to making decisions that truly matter to the customer.
Get Started with Conversation Intelligence with Level AI
Call centers are great at capturing customer information through voice, email, or chat. They even go further by creating a tremendous amount of customer-centric content. However, the missing link is how to unlock this treasure trove of data to empower agents and unlock higher performance levels.
Level AI leverages conversation intelligence to unlock this data and deliver information and insights on your call-centers performance.
Utilizing NLU and AI, Level AI analyzes 100% of customer interactions to automate QA and ramp up agent performance while providing real-time agent assistance by streaming content from all your applications to give agents contextual hints at the right time.
To find out more about how Level AI can help you unlock conversation intelligence for your organization, click this link to schedule a demo.
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