3 Ways to Make the Most of Conversation Intelligence in Customer Service

As a CX professional, are you driving value from conversation data? Here are 3 ways to maximize conversation intelligence.

Conversations between customers and agents (or chatbots) take many forms — from the traditional interaction with the contact center through a phone call to live chat, social, IVR, text message, and more. Today’s consumer wants to connect with customer service on their terms, which means the data around all conversations spans several tools and technologies.

With this rising volume of conversation data from a variety of sources, it’s difficult (and essentially impossible) to analyze all conversations for trends and patterns manually — which is why conversation intelligence is more relevant today than ever before. Conversation intelligence pinpoints key topics, emotions, themes, and more from conversations to determine the next best action for your contact center and other teams, support agent coaching opportunities, and ultimately, improve the customer experience.

Leading brands are turning to conversation intelligence to never miss a critical conversation, cutting through all the noise to understand what customers are saying, how they’re feeling, and where the biggest opportunities are to optimize customer service.

What is Conversation Intelligence?

Conversation intelligence is a technology that analyzes the interactions between a brand and customers to uncover insights. It accomplishes this by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to understand conversational data with text analytics and speech analytics to ultimately inform business decisions.

Here are the benefits of conversation intelligence:

• Enhance customer interactions: By analyzing conversations with customers, conversation intelligence pinpoints areas of improvement to increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer loyalty.
• Identify trends and patterns: Conversation intelligence helps spot emerging trends and patterns from interactions with the customer service team, as well as in customer feedback, which equips teams to meet changing customer needs and preferences efficiently.
• Bolster training and coaching: Conversation intelligence enables leaders to develop training and coaching programs for agents that target specific areas where individuals require additional support or guidance.
• Performance monitoring and evaluation: Monitoring and evaluating agent performance in real time with conversation intelligence helps managers and supervisors spot gaps in the level of customer service provided — and identify when top-performing agents deserve to be recognized.
• Decision making: By providing insights into expectations for customer service, conversation intelligence informs other areas of the business, including marketing strategies and product development.

Overall, the use of conversation intelligence by an organization significantly impacts how the brand interacts with customers.

How to Maximize Customer Service with Conversation Intelligence Software

Conversation intelligence software enables brands to tap into text and speech conversations with customers to derive actionable insights driving improved customer experience (CX), operational efficiency, compliance, and revenue (for contact centers with sales targets).

While the use cases for conversation intelligence are extensive, there are a few key areas to start with that generate the greatest impact for your organization.

#1. Analyze all conversations and share actionable insights across the business

Not all conversations occur with the customer service team. For a holistic view of the customer journey, capture as many interactions as possible and integrate all signals from every touchpoint into a single customer experience management (CEM) system for analysis.

Advanced, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered text and speech analytics are only the beginning. The key is sharing the insights gained with the teams capable of implementing change and empowering employees to act in a timely manner.

Receiving complaints about a failed experience on one of your digital channels, like a website or mobile application? Trigger automated alerts to the digital team before the issue becomes extensive, allowing your organization to act quickly and reduce the flood of incoming inquiries from angry customers who may overwhelm agents.

But you’d only know the root cause of the issue (and then the action to take) with conversation intelligence tools, which identify the themes and frequency of what customers are saying. Without conversation intelligence, your brand’s digital channels are lacking critical insight into the customer’s online experience — potentially offering a less-than-stellar digital experience (DX).

UMB Bank, a Kansas City-based financial services company, accelerated issue resolution by leveraging speech analytics to uncover insights that have resulted in millions of dollars in cost savings and 95% of customer issues resolved in just two days.

#2. Score every interaction automatically

Where, outside of contact center and customer service teams, are employees evaluated based on a random number of “projects completed”? Gone are the days of randomly selecting conversations to review during the quality assurance (QA) process. This is where conversation intelligence shines once again.

Today, every interaction between a brand and its customers can be automatically scored based on criteria aligned to compliance and priority key performance indicators (KPIs). Doing so empowers your QA team to focus on high-friction interactions where manual intervention will have the greatest impact on agent performance and overall CX.

By analyzing 100% of service interactions for customer sentiment and a variety of CX metrics, AAA – The Auto Club Group was able to resolve website issues that led to over 80,000 calls per year.

#3. Provide agents with useful context

Customers don’t enjoy repeating themselves multiple times to a bot or with each transfer between live agents. As the clock ticks, frustration grows for both the customer and the agent. Your customer wants to feel that their issue is important, and your agent wants to understand the situation in front of them before engaging.

Give agents the context they need so the conversation can start on a positive note.

Real-time coaching is gaining traction, but current use cases aren’t providing high value to the agents or customers. Agents don’t want to be alerted to show more empathy during a call or chat. Offer a better option instead: prepare agents before the call with context-driven assistance and during the call with links to internal documentation and an online knowledge base.

When agents are provided with useful context for critical conversations, customers feel heard and put their trust in your brand to achieve a satisfactory resolution. The result for the agent is an employee that feels supported and empowered to make a positive impact for both the customer and organization.

Choose Conversation Intelligence Software with AI-Powered Text & Speech Analytics

Industry leaders have something in common — they are all customer-centric and fully realize the importance of the contact center to deliver on that mission. Not only is the contact center where customers go to resolve issues, it also offers a gold mine of customer insights to drive strategy and decision-making. Conversation intelligence tools make all this possible by collecting and analyzing conversation data sourced from the front lines and delivering these actionable insights across the organization.

Conversation intelligence from Medallia leverages our industry-leading, AI-powered text and speech analytics to empower employees from the front lines to the boardroom to take immediate action. With over 100 service and technology partners to integrate with, our platform quickly captures and analyzes both chat logs and audio files wherever the conversation data is generated — inside and outside the contact center.

Here’s what you can expect with Medallia’s conversation intelligence:

• Uncover conversations impacting KPIs
• Coach with context on the moments that matter
• Solve for customer frustrations early
• Improve agent and organization compliance

Looking to gain a holistic view of the customer journey and arm agents with insights needed to resolve issues quickly? Schedule a demo — a Medallia expert will meet with you to explore how our platform’s conversation intelligence flips the script and turns your contact center into a profit center.