AI in Sales
May 21, 2024

Conversational Intelligence Software: What Is It All About?

Imagine this-you're on a call with a prospect, and the prospect reveals vital information about their company, their goals, and why they’re considering your organization to solve their problem. As a sales rep, you can only listen and maybe, note down only a few takeaways from the conversation. But, what happens if you want to revisit the conversation summary, so you’re not missing out on any important detail? Are you thinking of call recording software?Companies have been recording calls for years, but unfortunately, the recordings usually live in a dust folder in a floating cloud. Even if you do access the calls, very few people, use them in a meaningful way. So, how can sales teams use the call recordings to derive actionable insights?‍ Enter conversation intelligence software. When most people hear about conversation intelligence, the first thought is that it is a chatbot. But unlike chatbots, conversational intelligence software, or conversation AI is capable of assisting sales reps to achieve their goals seamlessly in tandem with human intelligence. 

Conversational Intelligence Software: What Is It All About?
Table of Content
  1. Introduction to Conversational Intelligence Software
  2. Working of Conversation Intelligence Software
  3. Benefits of a Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales Organizations
  4. Challenges in Leveraging Conversation Intelligence Software
  5. Tips to Optimize Conversation Intelligence Platform
  6. Take Conversation AI to the Next Level

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What is Conversational Intelligence?

Conversation intelligence software records, transcribes and analyzes every conversation and helps teams derive data driven insights from them.Conversational intelligence technology offers a myriad of benefits to organizations and sales teams alike. 

Conversation AI helps sales teams gain an understanding of what’s going on in the sales deal, surface the right information at the right time, and ensure no action items fall through the crack post-call. Rather than relying on surface-level assessments of written or spoken information, conversation intelligence leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to seamlessly deduce intent, provide meaningful insights, and sentiment from real-time data. 

Some of the key points that a sales team can capture during the conversation are: 

- Customer pain points 

- Common topics of interest and keywords 

- Objections about the product/service

- Suggestions for improvement

- Competition analysis 

- Talk:listen ratio

Interchanges per minute between the sales rep and the customer 

Rather than relying on surface-level assessments of written or spoken information, conversation intelligence leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to seamlessly deduce intent, provide meaningful insights, and sentiment from real-time data. Most conversation intelligence platforms also match relevant metadata to the conversations, including contact names, phone numbers, associated CRM fields, call direction and duration. 


Working of Conversation Intelligence Software

Conversation intelligence technology utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the customer’s sentiment, intent, and meaning. 

The technology records  sales conversations, analyses it, and delivers it in palpable formats for sales teams to apply to their sales strategy. Conversation AI makes use of algorithms to analyze useful information that can slip through the cracks by sales reps. 

For instance, conversation AI can identify markers  in a sales conversation that showcases the client showing hesitation to purchase your product and provides reactive solutions for the sales rep to act upon. 

Sales managers can analyse this information to understand the tactics of top-performing sellers and apply these winning strategies across the company

It can also take the load off of customer success reps by handling customer enquiries on its own or extracting data much more efficiently from past conversations. 

Conversation technology software broadly uses these two actions to achieve this: 

1. Input Analysis 

Conversation AI converts customer inputs (text or speech) into a computer-readable format that makes it easy to analyze and determine the customer's intention. This typically involves using complex processes like lexical semantics (study of word meanings) analysis, extraction of relationships, name recognition, sentiment recognition, and more. 

2. Response Generation 

Once the software analyses the conversation, the technology generates a suitable response with the help of natural language processing (NLP), so the sales rep can leverage it for their sales conversation. Over time, these responses become very accurate and useful with machine learning. 

Conversation intelligence software can be used extensively to measure the quality of sales conversations, anchor these conversations to move the deal further, or analyze it further to close deals quickly. 

Ready to start using conversation AI? Let’s see how this technology might be extremely valuable for sales organizations. 

Benefits of a Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales Organizations

1. Enhance Team Coaching and Rep Development

2. Provide Real-Time Support to Move the Deal 

3. Automating Recurring Sales Processes

4. Reform Useful Data into Successful Deals 

As described earlier, most people bucket their notions regarding conversation AI simply as chatbots. 

However, these tools are much more equipped and capable than just chatbots. 

With chatbots, the human element and intelligence is removed - limiting its capabilities to just automatic responses. 

Here are 5 reasons why switching to a conversation intelligence platform is useful for a B2B organization:

1. Enhance Team Coaching and Rep Development 

Conversation Intelligence tools record, analyze and provide insights into every customer interaction. With this, sales managers can identify how their reps are performing in the calls, know what they are doing right, where they are struggling and provide targeted feedback for improvement. 

The sales managers can also identify the actions of top performing sellers vs bottom-performers, and replicate the winning strategies of the top reps across.

2. Provide Real-Time Support to Move the Deal 

Regardless of the sales rep’s expertise, there are moments when even the most well-equipped sales rep struggles to answer their customers’ questions and objections. 

The only factor that sets a winning sales team from the other teams is their ability to handle customer queries smoothly. 

A strong coaching process helps, but it can only go so far without the aid of the right tools for real-time support. 

Conversation technology uses AI to analyze sales conversations and provides reactive and proactive cues to the sales rep in easy, digestible formats with the correct talking points such as - 

- Discovery questions:

What are the foundational questions they must ask and why?

- Ways to counter common objections:

What are the most frequently asked questions and how do the reps handle them?

- Pricing and onboarding details:

What are the key details of pricing and onboarding specific to your organization

- Competition analysis:

Do your reps really know what sets you apart from your competitors? Do they know how to handle such questions?

Conversation AI assists sales reps to answer such objections in a structured manner. 

It turns pesky rejections as signs for improvement, delays in responses will be seen as an entity to categorise issues and assign a relevant sales rep, and more. 

3. Automating Recurring Sales Processes

 Sales teams are always performing routine administrative tasks and check-ups. 

According to Salesforce, sales reps spend only 34% of their time in actual selling.

Not only are they spending the majority of their time in non-selling activities, because these tasks are manual, there are high chances of making human errors that often go unnoticed. 

Conversation intelligence platforms are optimal to not just free up sales reps’ time but also drastically reduce human errors by automating recurring processes. 

This process optimization enhances the value of every sales transaction by cutting sales time in half. 

4. Reform Useful Data into Successful Deals 

Most sales organizations invest millions in digital sales technology, often implementing disparate systems which may or may not contribute to the revenue engine. 

When salestech tools do not integrate with existing systems, data usually sits in a dark box preventing sales managers from accurately guessing the cracks, or overall progress of the team and deal performance. 

Because these managers lack the detailed insights required for personalized coaching, reps typically are disinterested and regard coaching  as generic and unimportant. 

Conversation AI tools such as Salesken provides a robust solution that aids sales managers with instant access during sales meetings to provide individual, personalized feedback. 

Data such as feedback on meetings, talking points, improvisation, and more can be accessed by a single click which allows for directly referenceable, coachable moments derived from real-time moments. 

Conversation intelligence also eliminates the surprise element in critical sales calls by bringing up call summaries, key takeaways, action items, and course-corrects you with reactive and proactive cues.

With quick access to action items, summaries, call snippets, and other coachable moments, sales reps can mitigate risks early on, effectively keeping track of the deal. 

Modern, powerful AI tools are incrementally more capable than just pre-defined answers by delivering trends, compelling moments, daily notifications to managers and reps’ inboxes.

Challenges in Leveraging Conversation Intelligence Software

Although conversations are the best avenue to extract learnings for sales conversations, there are a couple of challenges when it comes to implementing conversation AI. 

Unlike other salestech software, conversation intelligence is a blue ocean with a limited number of players acing the niche. Despite the low density, it’s still challenging to rely independently on the tool. 

Here are 3 challenges of levering conversation intelligent software: 

1. Easy Adoption and Discovery 

Although conversation AI tools are getting progressively simple to use, there are still some difficulties that can be defeated to expand the number of useful use-cases adopted by sales individuals, who are open to using the technology. 

Thus, instructing your user based on opportunities can enable the tool to be easily adopted across the organization and make a better experience for individuals who are not comfortable using it. 

2. Security and Privacy 

With voice assistants and a software that basically translates your sales conversations and records it, it is of utmost priority to safeguard the organization’s privacy. 

Organizations characterising these channels must be conveyed to the clients to establish a foundation of trust and high-security norms must be put in place, particularly while performing sensitive individual data. 

Conversation AI tools must be planned with security in mind to guarantee the protection. 

Only opt for tools that are GDPR compliant and have high-security norms in place to avoid being a victim of phishing and hacking. 

3. Language Input 

Regardless of the voice of input being voice or text, language input can be a difficult area for conversation intelligence tools. 

Various dialects and background noise can directly affect the effectiveness of the conversation AI’s capability to comprehend the raw input. In addition, slang and unscripted language can create issues with handling the information. 

Nevertheless, the greatest challenge for conversation AI is the human factor in the language fed in. 

Thus, before onboarding a conversation AI, ensure the tool is capable of jumping these hurdles and having minimum defects in the language area. 

Tips to Optimize Conversation Intelligence Platform

To actually benefit from using conversation AI, you need to understand how to harness the best out of the tool. 

Here are three tips you can follow to optimize conversation intelligence platform to get the maximum benefits out of the tool -

  1. Before attempting to incorporate conversation AI into your sales workflow, determine the individuals that will be using it and why. By defining your audience ahead of time, you can keep updating this technology and align it with your goals and objectives.
  2. Avoid forcing users to communicate with conversation AI. Allow the tool to enrich the customer journey without becoming a push-over by providing an easily accessible exit. 
  3. Do not ignore the data collected by conversation AI. As sales reps interact with your system, capture their interactions for deeper analysis, business performance improvement, and trend-spotting. 

Ready to Take Conversation AI to the Next Level?

Customer-facing conversations are incredibly helpful for any organization, but without a tool like conversation intelligence platform to mine them, it’s extremely hard to gain any value from these assets. 

While CI tools help to solve these challenges seamlessly, it is also important to realize that to drive real business value, sales leaders need to create meaningful lessons and learn at scale. 

Conversation intelligence software is the right answer to this. 

In addition, it is also vital to pick the right conversation AI tool to facilitate high business value, deliver coachable moments and provide personalized coaching for sales reps that are struggling, automate mundane tasks, and so much more. 

Salesken’s conversation AI brings the latest and best of artificial intelligence and data science to understand a conversation deeply. Unlike chatbots, Salesken’s conversation AI can understand the intent, with multiple implications - intent, tone, sentiment, and readiness to buy. 

A chatbot can never understand if the customer was happy or not, but with Salesken’s emotion detection engine can help identify if your lead was satisfied with the answer provided to any objection and also share the best responses that can influence your lead’s mind. 

Book a demo with our expert now to explore more possibilities in conversation intelligence software. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What differentiates conversational intelligence software from chatbots? 

Conversational intelligence software goes beyond the capabilities of chatbots by not only engaging with users but also recording, transcribing, and analyzing conversations to provide actionable insights, unlike chatbots that offer predefined responses.

2. How does conversational intelligence software enhance a sales team’s performance? 

It helps sales teams understand the nuances of customer interactions, providing real-time guidance and post-call analytics to improve sales strategies and outcomes.

3. Can conversational intelligence software predict customer behavior? 

Yes, by analyzing speech patterns, word choice, and sentiment, conversational intelligence software can deduce customer intent and predict behavior, aiding in more targeted sales approaches.

4. Is conversational intelligence applicable only to sales, or can it be used in other domains? 

While it’s particularly beneficial for sales, conversational intelligence can be applied across various domains, including customer service, marketing, and any other field that relies on communication analytics.

5. What are the privacy considerations when using conversational intelligence software? 

Users must ensure compliance with data protection regulations, such as GDPR, and obtain consent when recording and analyzing conversations to protect customer privacy.

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