Hey Siri.
Hey Alexa.
Hey Google.
Have you ever had a conversation with an AI chatbot like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant?
If you have, then you’ve engaged in conversation intelligence.
While conversational chatbots and artificial intelligence have found their way into the homes of millions of consumers worldwide, they’re also making their way into the business world.
The conversational AI market hit $9.9 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.5% between 2024 and 2032.
For sales managers looking to hit (and exceed) their sales targets, conversation intelligence can be a great help.
Conversation intelligence can provide much-needed support when we struggle with communication, systems, and sales calls.
In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know about conversation intelligence and platforms you can use to help you improve your sales funnel so you can close more deals and grow your business.
Table of Contents:
- What is conversation intelligence?
- How does conversation intelligence work?
- What are the benefits of conversation intelligence?
- The role of AI in conversation intelligence?
- Which channels can benefit from implementing conversation intelligence?
- Best practices for using conversation intelligence?
- The best platforms for conversation intelligence
- What tools should a conversation intelligence platform include?
- Get started with Clari Copilot today
What is conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence is software that analyzes speech and text data from conversations between sales reps and prospects using AI to create insights to drive business growth.
Simply put, you can use artificial intelligence to “listen” to your sales calls like a sales coach to help you improve your pitch, close more deals, and optimize your sales process.
Conversation intelligence platforms can automatically analyze vast amounts of data from your speech using machine learning and natural language processing.
The software can pinpoint specific topics and keywords in your interactions to help you identify areas where you can improve as a sales rep and different problems you can assist the prospect with to help you close the sale.
The tools can pull data from your call and your transcripts to give you insights into your audience's pain points and desires and help you gain insights into how you can sell them on your product or service.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversational intelligence uses artificial intelligence to extract text-based communication and human speech data.
How does it do this?
With natural language processing, or NLP.
NLP helps the artificial intelligence “listen” to the conversation to understand what is happening with each sentence.
Conversation intelligence leverages NLP to capture and process data from various sources:
- Chatbots
- Phone calls
- Voice assistant
- Messaging tools
The intelligence combines speech and text analysis into structured data that can be searched and analyzed.
Companies can use conversation intelligence in their everyday interactions with customers. Every conversation you have with a customer over the phone, message, email, video call, and more can be optimized with conversation intelligence.
Think of the implications of this.
Before, you had to recall a conversation from memory to improve your sales or customer communication. Or, you had to manually analyze a recording.
You can automatically analyze every interaction to improve customer communication with conversation intelligence.
What are the benefits of conversation intelligence?
Now that you understand how conversation intelligence works, let’s dig into why it’s crucial for your business success:
Understand your customer better
You need to understand how your customers think and feel to improve your business.
You can’t serve your customers well without knowing their:
- Wants
- Needs
- Desires
- Pain points
You need to know what they’re after to provide them with a solution.
Conversation intelligence can help you gain automated insights into your customers and prospects.
Improve the customer experience
With automated insights into your audience, you no longer have to play guessing games on what your customers want.
Not only does this mean you'll be able to serve them better products and services, but you’ll also be able to improve the customer experience.
Conversation intelligence can analyze sentiment, tone, voice, and more to give insights into how a customer feels and experiences the conversations with your brand.
This means you’ll be able to double down on your customer support and how you solve problems between service and sales.
Gain insight into how to close your customers
Conversation intelligence doesn’t just offer a helping hand in customer support. It’s also a brilliant sales sidekick. Your conversation intelligence software can analyze your sales calls to see when a customer is interested—and when they’re starting to lose interest.
You can automatically analyze exactly when a prospect is ready to buy.
Automate your sales process
Conversation intelligence can help you analyze sales calls but can also do several automated sales tasks. Conversation intelligence also automates:
- Lead research
- Lead info collection
- Sales call transcription
Improve your productivity
Since conversation intelligence can take a load off your hands regarding sales process tasks, you’ll have more time to focus on other tasks.
This means your team will have better productivity to spend more time on closing prospects and increasing your top-line revenue.
The role of AI in conversation intelligence?
Without artificial intelligence, conversation intelligence is impossible.
With the rise of AI, businesses can implement conversation intelligence to improve productivity, close more deals, and increase revenue.
Here’s how AI plays a role in conversation intelligence:
The rise of AI in conversational intelligence
As of 2022, 58% of demand and account-based marketers use conversation automation technology.
What does this tell you?
It means AI is on the rise and is here to stay.
To ensure you’re serving your prospects and customers effectively, you must leverage conversation intelligence in your daily communications.
How does AI perform in conversational intelligence?
Conversation intelligence is driven by artificial intelligence that can “read” or “listen” to conversations. This means when your sales reps are on the phone with prospects, the intelligence is quiet:
- Recording the conversation
- Collecting data
- Analyzing data
Then, once it’s completed the data analysis, it will give you insights on how to better serve your audience.
The best part? The most sophisticated conversation intelligence software, like Clari, can give you insights in real-time while you’re on the phone with a prospect so you can close them.
How is conversational AI different than conversational intelligence
Conversational AI and conversation intelligence are not the same thing. Conversational (with the “al” at the end) refers to chatbots that can respond to a conversation with you.
Think Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. These tools use conversation intelligence to understand your speech. But they interact with you.
Conversation intelligence simply collects, analyzes, and interprets data to give you specific insights into your conversations.
Which channels can benefit from implementing conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence isn’t just a viable tool for your sales calls over the phone.
You can leverage conversation intelligence in dozens of mediums and conversations in your business.
Here are the most popular channels you can use it in:
- Blogs
- Emails
- Forums
- Surveys
- Reviews
- Sales calls
- NPS/CSAT
- Social media
- Agent scoring
- Digital journeys
- Social media DMs
- CRM and agent notes
- Chatbot conversations
- Sales, services, and marketing
- Customer service call recordings
- Social media conversations on posts
By analyzing the unstructured data from different channels, conversation intelligence can give you and your business:
- Call transcriptions
- How long calls last
- Customer interactivity
- Customer sentiment insights
- Suggested actions to take next with the prospect
- The keywords and themes present in conversations
- Speech ratios (i.e., salesperson spoke 30% vs. prospect 70%)
Conversation intelligence can be used in a variety of mediums. It’s best to implement it in various ways to get its greatest results.
Best practices for using conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence will do a ton of the heavy lifting to help improve your customer research, close more sales, and improve productivity.
But there are a few key practices you’ll want to follow to get the most out of it:
Set clear KPIs
Before diving in and implementing conversation intelligence, you should set up key performance indicators (KPIs).
To know the impact of conversation intelligence on your business, you should set clear objectives and KPIs to back them.
Here are a few examples of KPIs you could set up:
- Sales call lengths
- Sales closing ratios
- Customer service call resolution times
- Conversation ratios (how much your sales team spoke vs. prospect)
- Sentiment scores (frequency of positive and negative language used by customers)
The KPIs you choose will vary from business to business and completely depend on your company’s long-term goals.
Assign a conversation intelligence manager
It’s not enough to set up KPIs for your conversation intelligence implementation. You need to put someone in charge of the software and intelligence initiatives.
This means appointing a sales, revenue, or customer support manager to lead the way. And in some cases, you may want to set up an entire team to manage it.
Track specific keywords in calls
To get the most out of your conversation intelligence platform, ensure your software analyzes the right keywords.
You can tell your software which keywords you want to track to judge various elements of your interactions, such as:
- Buyer interest
- Lack of interest
- Sentiment
- And more
Choose relevant conversation segments to listen to
You don’t necessarily need to analyze all your calls.
There may be sections of your call that don’t need to be tracked and analyzed.
You should choose specific parts of the call you want to track. With conversation intelligence, you can choose which parts of your call you want to analyze (i.e., the prospect, sales, or customer support rep).
Get your entire team on board
You need to get your entire team onboard to ensure you get the most out of your conversation intelligence tool. This should be one of the first responsibilities you assign to the manager in charge of this initiative.
Your leader or team in charge should be training and onboarding your entire staff on how to use conversation intelligence, why it’s important, and how they can get the most out of it to improve customer support and close more deals.
In almost any case, you should set up a key set of protocols your staff can refer to at any time.
Track your progress
Remember how we covered KPIs earlier? They’re no good if you don’t track your progress with them.
At the bare minimum, you should be tracking your stats monthly. This means setting specific targets and analyzing whether you’ve achieved them or fallen short.
You can adjust your benchmark to ensure you and your team are constantly improving if needed.
The best platforms for conversation intelligence
Conversation intelligence is only possible by leveraging software that offers it.
If you want to improve your productivity, close more sales calls, and grow your business, you’ll want to use one of these top conversation intelligence platforms:
1. Clari Copilot
Clari is a world-class revenue intelligence platform with a conversation intelligence tool built-in: Clari Copilot.
Clari Copilot enables sales reps and managers to have a full suite of tools to spot revenue leaks and close deals faster.
Key features of Clari:
- Real-time battlecards
- Monologue alerts to handle objections
- Game tapes to gain insights and improve
- RevAI in Copilot gives you conversationally formatted call summaries
- You’re given the next steps and suggested actions within Slack or Microsoft Teams
- Clari Copilot is SOC 2 Type 2-certified and GDPR-ready
2. Jiminny
Jiminny is a conversation intelligence tool that helps you gain end-to-end pipeline visibility. You can dig into the details of any conversation and get notified in real time of risks in a deal falling apart.
Key features of Jiminny:
- Real-time deal-risk notifications
- Automatic link dropping into Slack
- Snippets to capture key interactions
- Automated call recording logs for quick summaries
- Collaborative Playlists to save time on onboarding
3. Gong
Founded in 2015, Gong is one of the longest-serving conversation intelligence platforms. Gong helps coach your sales teams during key moments to help close more deals.
Key features of Gong:
- Call recordings
- Call insights
- Course correct for next steps
4. Fathom
Fathom is one of the best conversation intelligence software available due to its comprehensive business performance tracking.
Key features of Fathom:
- Robust analytics
- AI-driven alerts to notify reps of missed opportunities
- KPI builder to customize metrics for your team and set up
5. Mindtickle
Mindtickle is one of the leading conversation intelligence tools for its ability to train and develop sales teams at scale.
Key features of Mindtickle:
- AI-driven coaching and training
- Automated capture, scoring, and analysis of prospect interactions
- Insights to identify deal risks and buying behaviors.
What tools should a conversation intelligence platform include?
So, just what tools should a conversation intelligence platform have?
Here are just a few of the top features:
Automated call recordings, transcriptions, and summaries
After each sales or support call, your conversation intelligence software will give you a complete call recording. Plus, you’ll have access to transcriptions of the call to analyze it via text. The best software will summarize the call as well.
Real-time call analysis
The conversation intelligence platform you choose shouldn’t just give you detailed insights once a call is over. The best tools will give you real-time analysis during a call to give you insights in the moment.
Live sales assistance
With real-time analysis, you’ll get extra help from your conversation intelligence on how to steer the conversation in the right direction. Like a sales partner, it will “whisper in your ear” as live sales assistance, telling you what to say next to move the conversation forward.
Keyword alerts and tracking
If certain phrases are specific to your industry or business, then you’ll want to ensure your platform is tracking them. Conversation intelligence tools can track specific keywords to ensure you don’t miss an opportunity.
Auto-tagging to classify calls
Your calls can be classified to tag them as a prospect, customer support call, or a hot lead that’s ready to be closed. This will help you analyze the right conversations and filter to the ones you want to analyze most.
Get started with Clari Copilot today
If you want to remain competitive, you need to leverage AI.
One of the easiest ways to empower your business and team is with conversation intelligence.
Conversation intelligence can help your team gain insights into customer communications, close more deals, and reach new heights with revenue.
With Clari Copilot, you can access a robust intelligence tool suite to help you streamline your sales process, close more deals, and support your sales department.