What is conversational intelligence and why is it so important?

Every interaction with a buyer or lead provides valuable information for increasing your revenue. They highlight weak points, relevant subjects, recurring complaints, continuous improvement, important rivals, etc.  However, regardless of your best intentions, the pinnacle of that essential information wears on as you're getting closer to going home. Because of the time limitation, taking thorough notes, putting material into a database, and sharing it with a team might be not only tiresome but sometimes unattainable.

Since most businesses have been documenting sales conversations for years, a prominent technology has emerged to turn this old, static data into actionable sales intelligence. Let's look at conversational intelligence (C-IQ) and its basics.

Defining Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence is a person's or a software's ability to predict how a conversation will go and how it will end. In a retail business, salespeople play a critical function as the company's primary advocate to potential customers. They should be trained to read the situation by identifying the lead's potential pitfalls, responding to product-related questions, dealing with complaints and problems, etc. If salespeople have access to call records, notations, and call assessments, they can strengthen their conversation intelligence. This would allow agents to listen to past calls and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each one, allowing them to evaluate leads more quickly and effectively.

Modern technology allowed business owners to collect all of these on their computers. Along with AI came smart solutions that do the hard work for salespeople and provide all the necessary data, so the agent that's been assigned to a particular case has everything he needs in the palm of his hand.

Level Up

Conversations are not just basic exchanges of information - they can have more levels and dimensions, depending on how you access them. The art of communication is knowing how deep to go in a given situation.

A common approach in conversational intelligence has three levels, each representing a different manner of connecting with others. When members of a group, alliance, or corporation develop conversational intelligence together, they become highly coordinated. As a consequence, their collaboration pushes achievements to new heights.

• Level 1: Transactional exchanges

Patterns of interaction like exchanging basic data are common in transactional talks. These discussions validate what we already know and provide a space for people to share and receive information.

• Level 2: Positional exchanges

This level goes into somewhat deeper interactions, such as questioning things. These discussions let us explain what we think and provide a place for people to have and share strong opinions on a topic. We're less inclined to be influenced and more engaged in pitching our ideas.

• Level 3: Transformational exchanges

The last level is about transforming discussions that go deep into sharing and exploring. This entails posing questions about the things you have no clue about, hearing out the community, finding what you don't know, and exchanging knowledge and insights. This dynamic way of communicating leads to more discoveries, more creative thinking, and more attention, allowing you to connect with the perspectives of others. People are more forthright, trusting, and receptive to persuasion.

When a group leader can determine which level of communication to act on, other team members can effectively work to help attract or retain a customer.

Implementing conversational intelligence

You can use a mix of manual (human) and automated (technology) C-IQ to improve different parts and aspects of your business, some of them being:

• Customer Support: By utilizing this technology, customer support representatives can reduce the time required to answer client concerns and questions while improving user satisfaction. You can conduct research and offer possible solutions to common inquiries to clients, saving time for more challenging assignments. C-IQ can help redirect incoming client problems to the right colleagues automatically, avoiding wasteful transfers before a live discussion starts.
• Training and orientation: To perfect their abilities, new employees in any organization require rigorous coaching and supervision. Conversational intelligence helps businesses with sizeable turnover and heavy responsibilities to achieve goals. For instance, it can enhance the teaching process that recruits rely on by responding to questions and managing agents' activities in a busy work environment. This system can also be used in call reporting to notify management when a customer encounter requires professional participation in order to be adequately resolved.
• Best Practices: Conversation intelligence software allows you to simply analyze your team's calls, allowing everyone to hear a specific representative's session, evaluate, and debate what went smoothly and what could be fixed. It promotes collaborative learning and team discussion. These lessons can then be shared with other departments and the rest of the staff.
• Voice assistance: New technologies that respond to voice commands have emerged as strong assisting tools with long-reaching potential. From making gadgets more available to persons who use support technology to fueling security protocols based on speech identification, conversational intelligence offers a wide range of uses.

Track and analyze 100% of your communications

You'll always have weak spots to cope with if you rely only on strategies like shadowing to follow the situation. And besides, your QA team can't possibly be involved in every single discussion your sales and support teams have with their consumers.

That guarantee, however, can be provided by C-IQ technology.  You can relax knowing that all of your encounters are handled, tracked, and accounted for, allowing minimal chances for mistakes.

Learn how to see things from your customer's point of view

Ultimately, your company is only as good as your knowledge about your customer, so you must understand what they're searching for. That requires learning as much as you can about what fascinates, motivates, or repels people, especially concerning the organizations they do business with.

Including C-IQ in your evaluation methodology can help you identify trends, concerns, and issues that come up frequently in your customers' interactions. You'll learn how they really think and communicate. You'll discover what style speaks to people and produces the best results.

Conclusion

Buyer-oriented interactions are a valuable strength of any organization, but without technology like conversation intelligence to harvest such data, gaining worth from these materials is difficult. Financial managers can spend all day attempting to gather conversation insights from someone's reports or selecting files to study, but it's clearly not viable.

Implementing conversational intelligence technology provides a limitless stream of important knowledge without driving attention away from time spent selling.

Andrej Fedek is a digital marketer. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing called InterCool Studio. His passion is to help startups grow and thrive in a competitive environment.