The Marchex Blog

Conversation Intelligence: What it is, how it works and why to use it

Conversation Intelligence solutions utilize AI-powered software to analyze the content of a company’s voice, text or chat conversations with potential and current customers. When customer conversations with businesses are captured and analyzed, Conversation Intelligence can surface informative business insights for teams responsible for creating revenue, including sales and marketing. By integrating this solution with other technologies such as a CRM or digital advertising management platform, analytics data is organized and shared automatically, facilitating real-time data-driven decisions for teams on the front line of revenue generation. 

Why first-party data is critical for optimizing customer experience 

Team members across the revenue organization in sales and marketing strive to learn what they need to know about their customer in order to provide the best possible experience. That includes understanding a customer’s challenge, discovering the unique priorities a solution must have, and/or having awareness of their desired use case for implementation. The good news is that, unlike third-party data that may be incomplete or inaccurate, much of this data is available directly from the customer who is often open to sharing it, if it helps them solve a problem. 

Conversations are the new first-party data 

When customers call, email, text or chat with your business, they tell you what they want and what criteria need to be met to make a purchase. This is the best source of data when it comes to understanding your customer because you got the information from them directly. Tracking digital ad clicks or relying on post-opportunity surveys pales in comparison when it comes to understanding customer intent. 

The challenge is collecting the data in one place and getting it to the right team member at the right touchpoint at the moment it’s needed. This is the power of Conversation Intelligence solutions. Data is collected via call tracking or other communication channels and is organized and shared with Sales and Marketing teams in real time.  

How call tracking and Conversation Intelligence work together 

Businesses that drive calls and texts know it is vital to track these conversations so they don’t miss potential opportunities and to provide an ongoing positive experience for the customer. However, as businesses grow, it can be difficult to get the full value from the data since listening to every call or reading every conversation transcript individually isn’t practical.  

Conversation Intelligence solves this problem by tracking phone calls and texts automatically, turning unstructured conversations into an immediately organized and accessible flow of data. Cutting-edge AI technology identifies new opportunities, measures performance based on conversions, and provides accountability for sales teams hoping to increase their numbers, empowering businesses of all sizes to improve their customer experience and shore up parts of their customer acquisition pipeline that may be leaking. 

What Conversation Intelligence can do for your business 

Conversation Intelligence can be applied across the customer journey to the benefit of both Sales and Marketing teams. As a new prospect enters the funnel, Journey Intelligence enables your business to understand the path to purchase by seeing the actions a customer takes from lead to close. Conversation Intelligence can also reveal Customer Intent, which enables your business to identify what your prospective buyer wants. Armed with this knowledge, Informed Engagement enables your Sales team to take relevant action, delivering the right next steps to close the deal. 

How Sales teams use Conversation Intelligence 

Journey Intelligence and Customer Intent give a seller a head start from the first point of interaction, enabling Informed Engagement. By providing rich context of the prospect’s activity, a seller can warmly engage with the prospect or customer and personalize the buyer’s experience as they interact with the company. Knowing which campaign or offer generated the buyer’s interest, which properties or content they interacted with and how they reached out to the business signal the buyer’s interest and intent. Informed Engagement is now possible with a reduced level of effort and with a degree of consistency that has been much more difficult for Sales organizations until recently. This is what’s generating so much excitement about Conversation Intelligence solutions amongst Revenue teams. 

Sales leaders know which leads to prioritize so more opportunities are won. Managing the pipeline becomes more efficient. Sales leaders can also review sales calls, gaining an objective, data-driven process that measures productivity and provides coaching opportunities for sellers who may need more training. By implementing the best practice behaviors of top performers across the team, sales leaders can implement strategies that boost revenue team-wide.  

Conversation Intelligence can even reveal when a sale that should have happened didn’t and alert the sales team within minutes, providing a second chance at gaining the sale.  

How Marketing teams use Conversation Intelligence 

Marketing teams need Journey Intelligence and Customer Intent data to understand how their customer acquisition strategies perform. Data from the conversations their campaigns are driving can help marketers make better, more informed decisions. When the prospective customer is ready to be handed off to sales, Informed Engagement enables the seller to be more effective in closing the opportunities that Marketing delivers.  

At the beginning of this process, multichannel attribution enables modern Journey Intelligence by combining website session data with consumer behavior data and conversational signal data mined using AI to generate highly granular views and metrics that reveal marketing performance. This data can be fed into marketing and automated bid management platforms to optimize marketing campaign performance at a scale not previously possible.  

As marketers nurture leads through the marketing funnel, Journey Intelligence provides much needed context on where the customer is in the buying process and what information will be most beneficial as they proceed. Being able to tailor customer journeys based on the context of previous interactions with a business helps marketers connect with potential new customers in much richer ways, providing a positive and productive customer experience. 

To learn how our award-winning Marchex Conversation Intelligence solutions can be applied in your business, schedule a consultation