It’s 2023, and meetings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Case in point, employees in middle management spend 35% of their day in meetings. And sales leaders can spend even longer in daily meetings.
The kicker here is that most business meetings are unproductive. So if you’re going to dedicate your time to internal and external meetings that bring value to your startup, it’s essential to make sure they’re productive. The good news is that conservation intelligence can help you optimize your operations and drive tremendous growth.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about conversational intelligence so you can make the judgment for yourself. Let’s dive in.
What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence is the process of gleaning data-backed insights from conversations with staff, stakeholders, and customers. You can leverage conversation intelligence thanks to online tools and software that do all the heavy lifting.
For instance, startups have a powerful ally in the rapidly evolving tech domain aimed at understanding, analyzing, and drawing insights from voice-based interactions. It’s become a key tool for sales and operations optimization.
How? Improving the value of client-facing and sales calls via text-to-speech software. Text-to-speech software transforms written information into spoken words, providing a hands-free mode of information consumption. You can use this advanced technology to increase operational efficiency in several ways.
To begin with, text-to-speech can drastically improve accessibility within your company. With employees now able to absorb information through listening, it becomes easier to multitask and makes consuming data possible for individuals with specific reading challenges or disabilities.
Next, this software aids customer engagement and satisfaction. Many startups and sales teams rely heavily on digital interfaces for customer interaction, and incorporating text-to-speech capabilities can make these interfaces more user-friendly and versatile.
A customer may choose to listen to product descriptions, instructions, or FAQs, for example, which could improve the overall user experience. A customer service virtual assistant can also be of great help to deal with your users professionally and improve customer experience.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some more examples of conversation intelligence at work:
- Real-time speech coaching gives immediate conversation feedback.
- Chatbots and virtual assistants provide context-aware assistance.
- Natural language processing (NLP) interprets human language.
- Speech analytics detect emotions and key topics in speech.
- Multi-channel integration consolidates communication data.
- Emotion recognition identifies emotional states in speech.
- Call recording and transcription transcribe conversations.
- Voice biometrics recognize unique voice characteristics.
- Sentiment analysis categorizes opinions and attitudes.
- Predictive analytics forecast conversation outcomes.
- Text analytics find patterns and themes in text.
What are the Benefits of Conversation Intelligence?
If you’re running a new startup, you’re probably spending most of your time building a team, taking calls from prospects and customers. But we all know that sales calls aren’t the only balls you’re juggling. And sadly, taking detailed meeting notes can slip through the cracks.
Using a conversation intelligence tool can help you:
- Record, track, and store all customer-facing calls so you can find all the information you need to make accurate business decisions.
- Understand the pain points of your audience to optimize your sales and marketing campaigns.
- Keep track of proof of concept (POC) requests and customer commitments to successfully onboard new customers.
- Identify feature requests that can help you surpass your competitors.
All of these insights can help you:
- Build a marketing strategy that pinpoints and addresses your customers’ greatest concerns.
- Produce a winning sales strategy that gets better with each customer call.
- Create a better product or service.
Now that you fully understand the merits of implementing conversation intelligence into your startup, let’s move on to the next section.
Common Conversation Intelligence Use Cases
If you’re looking for ways to implement conversation intelligence in your startup, here are some popular use cases to follow:
Using Conversation Intelligence to Identify The Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Generally speaking, VoC is what your customers say about what they want from you. In a normal setting, finding out specifically what your customers want can be a challenge.
Identifying the VoC is your best chance at building a product or service that completely resonates with your target audience. With conversation intelligence, you can capture specific sentiments about your product your customers are mentioning on your calls.
Think of it like peering into a crystal ball where you learn exactly what your customer wants and needs. With that information in your back pocket, you can create the best product or service on the market. And your customers will choose your product over your competition every time.
Sounds idyllic, right?
Leveraging Conversation Intelligence to Improve Customer Service
You don’t only benefit from conversation intelligence during customer calls but also during customer support sessions on your website.
Another popular conversational artificial intelligence tool is a voice assistant. With more than 50% of adults using voice search in 2023, it’s no longer a nice-to-have but a strategic move to reach your audience using their preferred channels.
That way, consumers can use voice search to find your website or landing page. From there, you’ll offer them a similar voice search experience to find information on your site. The seamless transition will prevent high bounce rates and keep potential customers on your site longer.
And to achieve full conversation intelligence “Inception” (think: the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio), tap into the power of an AI subtitle generator to transcribe these specific customer interactions.
The result? You’ll build a database of the most commonly searched keywords and questions directly from the mouths of your customers. Think of this information as the gold you need to train the artificial intelligence models that power your chatbots and other conversational tools.
You can then direct potential customers down the most direct path to a conversion. In short, meeting the current demands of your customers and removing as much friction in the buyer’s journey leads to happy customers and higher sales. What’s not to love?
Implementing Conversation Intelligence for In-Depth Customer Research
User research ultimately becomes easier with conversation intelligence. You can parse through countless customer behavior insights that aid your marketing and sales strategies.
In fact, here are some questions you can answer during a conversation intelligence session:
- What are the pain points of different segments of customers? What do they all care about?
- How do they feel about your product or service? Which are their favorite features, and which ones don’t work?
- What phase do customers reach out to your business?
- What do their budgets look like?
Conversation intelligence can help you dig into the minds of your target audience and improve your business , and optimize your marketing plan. The best part? You don’t have to manually collect or clean this treasure trove of data.
It’s all available to you at the click of a button. Conversation intelligence software to help track it for you as you continue with business as usual.
Taking More Accountability With Conversation Intelligence
One of the things customers hate the most is when a business fails to keep its word. To run a successful business, you’ll need to understand what your audience is expecting from you so you can fully commit.
With SaaS products, this can be tricky. That’s because you’re constantly trying to roll out new features to keep your existing customers happy while attracting new ones. And throughout this process, you might upset users that have backed your company from day one.
For instance, you might have to raise prices to keep up with rising inflation or to fund the rollout of advanced features. New customers won’t care as much because they never knew what the prices were before they signed up.
However, your original customers will notice a price increase almost immediately. With conversation intelligence, you can keep track of proof of concept requests from your staff and customers to yield a more satisfactory product.
And your sales managers can train staff on properly communicating with customers when discussing these scenarios to take accountability and remain compassionate.
Wrapping Up
Overall, conversation intelligence is a highly useful tool for startups. You can leverage conversation intelligence to turn your customers’ insights into key action items.
And let’s not forget that conversation intelligence allows you to focus more on scaling your businesses instead of attending all of those unproductive meetings and taking manual notes that get lost on your laptop forever.
If you plan on running a successful startup, invest in a conversation intelligence platform. They’re the key to happy customers and a better bottom line. You won’t regret it.