Your business phone calls with existing and potential customers are perhaps your business’s greatest untapped resource.

As a small business owner, you may find yourself in a position where you are constantly interacting with your customers, answering dozens of business calls a day, and addressing a wide range of concerns from them.

But the big question is, what do you do with all the data you gather from these calls?  If you are not careful, all that information can get lost as soon as you hang up the call.

So, how can you extract helpful insights from customer calls and use them to improve your service delivery?  Conversation intelligence (C.I) may be the answer.

In this post, we discuss everything you need to know about conversation intelligence and how the powerful insights driven by the conversations that matter most to your customers can drive growth.

What Is Conversation Intelligence?

To date, a lot of social listening and business analytics is about data. Marketers are more focused on gathering, interpreting, and acting upon loads of data collected from blogs, social networks, news sites, and much more.

They dig deeper into the data to understand customer behaviors and create actionable insights.

However, most of them forget to monitor the social aspect of the interactions that generate this data. Generally, individuals don’t set out to create data. Instead, they build conversations, rave about great services, share joint experiences, establish real emotions, and rant when things aren’t done right.

Conversation intelligence goes deeper than conventional social listening. It is a relatively new mindset designed to turn routine conversations into actionable intelligence that business brands can use to optimize their digital marketing strategies. It is more about creating a single source of truth for your brand.

It is about creating helpful insights on lead quality and call outcome, mostly gained through call analytics. Common forms of C.I include call recording, call scoring, and call transcription.  All of these usually work together to identify highly qualified leads for a more focused ad spend approach and improved ROI.

How Does Conversation Intelligence Work?

To start using conversation intelligence to drive your digital marketing strategy, you must deploy a conversation intelligence software/platform.

When a business call comes in, your conversation intelligence software captures the marketing source that drove the call and crucial demographic information about the caller. It also analyzes the entire phone conversation to uncover any actionable insights that can help your sales team streamline their operations.

The information recorded from these business calls is then pushed back to your team in a palatable format they can understand. One way conversation intelligence can help you is by providing you with precise insights, via conversation cues, where a prospective customer is in the buying process.

The technology uses sophisticated algorithms to identify critical information that could otherwise go undetected during business calls. For instance, conversation intelligence can identify essential cues in a phone call that indicate a prospective customer’s willingness to buy.

Determining the conversational patterns of high-quality vs. low-quality leads early on can save your sales team from wasting time on unproductive prospects.

You can also use conversation analytics to evaluate what some of the best-performing competitors are doing differently so you can step up your game.

Furthermore, you can implement salesforce conversation intelligence to share crucial information across the team, so individuals don’t waste a lot of time updating one another.

What Insights Can C.I Capture From Phone Conversations?

Conversation intelligence technology is designed to automatically transcribe your business call conversations and analyze them deeply for insights.

In most cases, the critical data points from the conversation are automatically highlighted and tagged based on a unique AI model.

Here are some of the critical data points that conversation intelligence can easily capture from your phone conversations:

• Was the call answered?
• What was the exact call duration?
• How long did the caller wait on hold?
• Did the call go to voicemail?
• Did the caller abandon the call?
• Was the call about a sales or appointment opportunity?
• Were any of your flagged keywords spoken during the call?
• What was the call’s lead score?
• What products or services did the caller express interest in?
• Did the call result in a conversion?

What Are the Benefits of Conversation Intelligence for Small Businesses?

It is relatively easy to see the value of deploying a conversation intelligence platform in your organization, e.g., shorter sales cycles, more closed deals, and a better understanding of customer needs. But there are other benefits, too.

They include;

1. Saves the time needed to qualify leads

How much time does your team waste trying to qualify leads to no avail? One of the biggest benefits of conversation intelligence is its ability to save your team a good chunk of time.

Once you invest in conversation intelligence software, you won’t have to waste time transcribing and listening to calls yourself.

The system will automatically transcribe the calls and identify crucial data points to help you speed up your lead qualification process and pursue prospects faster than ever before.

2. Uncover voice-of-the-customer insights

With conversation intelligence, you get a chance to uncover some of the common question marks that your prospects ask, the common phrases they use to refer to your services, and the value propositions that matter most to them.

You also get to understand their objections, price sensitivity, and much more. You can then use these insights to adjust your ads, inform your outreach campaign and train your sales agents.

3. Accurately measure your marketing ROI

C.I enables you to measure the exact volume of your inbound calls driven by different marketing campaigns and the value of these calls. You can easily tap into this information to establish how your marketing effort impacts your business results.

4. Make smarter business decisions

With scalable data on your clients’ conversations, you can always leverage the intelligence from these calls to improve your marketing campaigns, customize ad creative, build audiences, and even generate more conversions.

For instance, conversation intelligence can improve your Google Ad campaigns and help you drive more high-converting business calls.

5. Detect and correct conversion issues

Conversation intelligence tools can also help you detect a wide range of issues that may be impacting your conversions negatively. Perhaps your call center agents are letting inbound calls go to voicemail, failing to stick to the script, or routing calls inefficiently.

Some of the C.I tools available send email notifications whenever quality leads aren’t converting and when calls go to voicemail. You will also receive recommendations on how to improve your call process to achieve better conversion rates.

Conversation Intelligence Can Power Your Small Business

When you can turn your conversations into high-value actionable takeaways, you unlock your small business’s potential for massive growth.

Since you will have a deeper understanding of your customers through conversation intelligence, you can use the insight to improve your service delivery and address their pain points. Your entire team will also be empowered with the knowledge and powerful tools needed to tackle any challenge that may come their way.

Are you interested in generating more inbound calls for your business?  Talk to us today and let us find out if we are a good match!