Every day, companies are generating huge amounts of data from internal and external conversations. Each discussion with a customer, interaction between employees and call with your partners and suppliers can hold incredibly useful insights.
However, to take advantage of these insights, businesses first need the right technology. Capable of understanding and categorising human language, conversational analytics tools provide endless learning opportunities for brands. These AI-enhanced solutions are fantastic for learning more about your employees, customer journeys, and avenues for growth.
As the world of communication evolves, certain trends are emerging to transform conversational analytics from a “nice to have” solution, to a must-have investment. Here are some of the most significant trends driving the adoption of conversational analytics.
1. Unified UCaaS and CCaaS Platforms
Over the last couple of years, the rapid shift into the cloud has left the average employee accessing a huge variety of digital tools on a daily basis. Some estimates suggest the average employee moves through around 13 apps up to 30 times per day. Bringing more of these tools together in a unified environment can deliver a host of benefits to brands.
With an all-in-one environment for UCaaS, CCaaS, and other cloud tools, employees benefit from better productivity, contextual insights, and user experience. An aligned ecosystem also makes it easier to track and share useful data throughout the workplace. As the cloud platforms we use each day become more integrated, embedding conversational analytics into the ecosystem could empower staff and business leaders like never before.
The right tools can boost collaboration by giving team members instant access into customer information and sentiment when they’re working together on a challenge. Conversational analytics in a unified environment can also streamline workflows by allowing teams to find and use transcriptions, translations, and other valuable information in one place.
2. The Rise of Hybrid Work
While remote working has captured the attention of employees for some time, its only recently that we’ve begun to see companies genuinely embracing new types of workplaces. Since the pandemic, the “hybrid” environment, allowing employees to work both inside and outside of the office has become more common. Around 76% of employees say their businesses are exploring hybrid work.
Conversational analytics can significantly improve the work experience for distributed employees. With an AI bot featuring conversational analytics technology, companies can provide their remote employees with assistants to help them solve common issues without IT guidance. The same tools can also improve collaboration between distributed teams.
Real-time transcription and translation ensure even if employees are working from different countries, or with different levels of audio quality, they can still understand eachother. All the while, conversational analytics tools can also help to boost engagement, by providing team members with real-time insights into their performance, and the impact they’re having on customers.
3. Contextual Conversations
Context is one of the most important things we can have in a conversation. However, in the past, it has often been difficult to leverage the right information at the start of a meeting or discussion. Conversational analytics tools can rectify this issue.
In the collaborative world, AI systems with conversational analytics abilities can instantly detect keywords mentioned in a conversation and surface relevant information to users. The same tools can also identify the people in a meeting, and provide users with guidance into each contact’s background, to make meetings more meaningful and productive.
When it comes to customer service, conversational analytics tools can take the benefits of context even further. The right solutions can provide agents with information about a customer at the beginning of a call, to allow for more personalised service. What’s more, these tools can work across an omnichannel environment, to align insights from multiple conversations on different platforms.
4. Employee Experience and Wellbeing
When most companies assess the value of conversational analytics for their business, their first focus will be on the benefits these tools can have for customer service. Insights into everything from customer sentiment to conversational trends can significantly improve any customer service strategy.
However, the right conversational analysis tools can also strengthen employee experiences too. Intelligent apps and services can transcribe calls in real-time to make it easier for remote employees to stay engaged in a meeting. These tools can also track sentiment and engagement levels in employees during conferences and webinar sessions, to provide supervisors with meaningful insights.
As mentioned above, conversational analytics can also form the foundation of a powerful strategy for employee engagement. Aligned with contact centre tools and dashboards, AI analytics can provide users with real-time insights into performance metrics. With gamification elements, companies can create competitions for individuals and teams, to keep workplace satisfaction high.
5. Automation Opportunities
In recent years, companies have begun to discover the benefits of automation for empowering employees, improving customer service, and reducing costs. As the workplace continues to grow more complex in the new hybrid world, automation can be crucial to enhancing the workforce.
With conversational analytics, companies can discover new opportunities for automation to boost team productivity and efficiency. Conversational analytics tools can automatically leverage information for employees during internal meetings and customer conversations. The same tools can also automatically transcribe and store conversations for analysis at a later date.
In the UC environment, conversational analytics tools can reduce a lot of the administrative and repetitive tasks employees need to do each day, significantly improving workflows. Combined with other analytics systems, the right tools can also offer an end-to-end view of the workplace for business leaders, so they can determine where employees are struggling, need more support, or can benefit from additional AI assistance.
The Rise of Conversational Analytics
More than just a tool for collecting insights into customer sentiment, conversational analysis is quickly becoming a table-stakes investment for modern brands. The more companies can learn from their business conversations, the more they’ll be able to invest in rapid growth and transformation.
