How to use Conversation Intelligence to Improve Business Productivity

It’s all too easy to think about business productivity as a big picture idea only. Something only the CEO needs to be thinking about as they strategise.

It’s not the case. Most productivity is lost on a granular level. In fact, despite the futuristic claims that the phone call is a dying art, the reality is a huge amount of businesses depend on it. The less discussed reality is that it’s where a huge amount of businesses see the most dramatic effects on their productivity levels.

For a variety of industries, from estate agents through to car dealerships, the phone is a lifeline between them and their customer. It’s how they do most of their business, whether that's a sales or a service call.

Yet many of these same businesses seem to think that someone picking up the phone and being polite is enough. But in today’s customer-centric world, it isn’t.

Conversation intelligence as part of a Business Impact Assessment

A business impact analysis and assessment (BIA) considers what is impacting on business performance today and what may affect it tomorrow. By considering both the current and future business weaknesses, business gets a much more complete picture of their business risks and opportunities for improved business performance, and how best to allocate resources. Conversation intelligence can help understand risks to both today's business performance and tomorrow's.

What is conversation intelligence?

Conversation intelligence comes under a variety of names and with a bunch of different features, but they all refer to the same thing. It’s any technology which helps you measure the efficiency of a phone call.

On a simplistic level, most conversation intelligence software will provide you with the basic information like:

• Average call duration

• Call conversion rate

• Call conversion value

• The amount of call conversions in a given period

• The number of calls

• Missed calls

These are just a few of many data points that conversation intelligence can provide you with. There are also more qualitative call analytics that analyse and review the actual contents of the call to  assess things like call ownership and call answering skills.

Similarly, there are conversation intelligence that give you a birds-eye view of how well your phone department is doing. This includes aspects like call management and call handling analytics. These data points can reveal where processes are and aren’t working for companies.

As with web analytics, the data itself is useless if companies take no action after reviewing it. It’s with these insights and action that you can improve productivity levels across your business — and there are plenty of ways to do it. You can:

• Improve call answering

• Improve customer experience

• Increase conversions

We’ll take a look at them more in depth.

‍Improve call answering

Call answering skills are vital for agents. These exact skills will vary slightly from industry to industry, though in general agents need to be:

• Welcoming

• Engaging

• Proactive

• Helpful

• Responsive

• Polite

• Positive

They may also need to demonstrate some technical knowledge or expertise, as well as competency in using different CRM systems.

Conversation intelligence software can give you great insights into where agents are thriving at this and where they could use some additional training or help. Overall, it can help you significantly increase your customer service levels. This can help increase the lifetime value of customers, as well as increase brand loyalty and trust.

Improve customer experience

With call tracking phone numbers the phone call is an important step of the customer experience you can assess. In the digital world, today’s customer experience begins the moment a potential customer first takes notice of your brand.

From there, a customer is likely to have many different touchpoints with your business, for example on your site or through social media to name a couple. At some point in this journey they may end up on the phone to your company.

You want this to be for the right reasons. By this we mean for a productive reason, not for something that they could’ve found answers to online, or worse yet, a complaint. But knowing how complaints have been handled is vital information too. In fact, a complaint handled well may even result in a more loyal customer than if there'd been no complaint at all (though we don't recommend this as a strategy).

From businesses we’ve worked with, you’d be amazed at how much of the average phone agent’s time is taken up with unnecessary phone calls. It’s not the customer’s fault, nor the agent’s; it’s the company’s.

These unnecessary phone calls should be being addressed through using conversation intelligence and figuring out where the customer experience could be improved to prevent them in the future.

For example, let’s say your company is taking a substantial amount of phone calls to double-check appointment times. It’s wasting the time of the phone agents and the customer. You could easily fix it using marketing automation to create a scheduled email or text after an appointment is booked to remind them of their appointment a couple of days before.

This is just one example of many. But the takeaway is that conversation intelligence should be used to address these issues. Improving the customer experience helps streamline processes across your business, freeing up more time in everyone’s day.

Increase conversions

With a great customer service and customer experience in place, conversions are highly likely to increase.

Your employees have more time to spend on worthwhile calls and chasing potential leads. Your customers are happier with the service and more likely to convert. Your customer experience addresses all the pain points you’ve identified through analysis.

All in all, your company runs more efficiently and is more productive and profitable.

Your call reports should contain important business information. They’ll have issues and concerns raised by customers, also details of what customers are pleased with. Business improvement ideas will be easily identifiable and highlighted company-wide and by department.

The summarised and detailed call reports can be handed out to individuals, managers and teams. Actions will be able to be specified easily and quickly. If further actions are necessary the calls are quickly available to be accessed and reviewed.

Easy access to call recordings

Conversation intelligence allows users to search the call recordings and investigate the information further. Notes can be left, calls can be marked for further attention and actions and the calls can be emailed to others if they need to listen to them. Sharing business information, keeping communication channels open between customers and the business, and also between all internal departments will benefit your business & help to eradicate silos. Call recording and monitoring is all about sharing and identifying the nuggets of business intelligence that will improve your bottom line.