Featuring:

Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Christina McAllister, Senior Analyst, and Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst

Shownotes:

As more business shifts to digital and online platforms, the breadth of insights that can be gained from digital interactions is increasing exponentially. In this episode, a recorded session from last year’s Data Strategy & Insights Forum, Principal Analyst Max Ball discusses the benefits and challenges around conversational intelligence with Senior Analyst Christina McAllister and Principal Analyst Seth Marrs.

The conversation starts with each analyst discussing what they see as compelling use cases for conversational intelligence within their areas of expertise. McAllister focuses on customer service and says that while customer service calls have been recorded for “eons,” those calls haven’t been effectively mined for customer insights because doing so is simply too labor-intensive. But there are now platforms that can automate the evaluation and analysis of customer service calls to pull more insights out of those calls more efficiently.

In his work, Marrs focuses on how sales teams and leaders can leverage conversation intelligence. He says that while the volume of calls is lower for sales than customer service, new technology lets sales managers use “triggers” to analyze the key moments in sales calls to help coach sellers and track deal progression. “Usually, that call ends in a sale or ends in a loss, so they can see how far they got,” he says. “And then [sales trainers] go back and look through it and give guidance.”

How big of an impact could this have? McAllister says that historically, contact centers have been seen solely as labor-intensive cost centers. But automating the call review process can help identify sellable leads from calls and improve the quality of leads coming from those calls, and that can change the perception of a contact center.

The episode closes with each analyst providing their prediction for where conversational intelligence will go in the future, so be sure to stick around for that. To learn more about our upcoming Data Strategy & Insights event, view the agenda here.