Running a business isn’t just about making sales and growing revenue. It’s about learning the ins and outs of your customers: their wants and needs, common questions, pain points, dislikes, and overall experience.

The more customers you have and the larger your business grows, the harder it is to keep up with all of this information on your own — especially if you have nowhere to gather and store that data except your own memory or a bunch of sticky notes.

But what if you could use artificial intelligence and machine learning to do all of this work for you? You can keep running your business like you do every day with inbound and outbound calls, but you have a virtual transcriber listening to conversations and pulling out the insights and keywords you need most.

In this article, we’ll show you how some of the most innovative companies are using Conversation Intelligence to truly listen to their customers and drive real bottom line impact for their businesses.

Let Conversation Intelligence categorize, tag, and prioritize conversations automatically

Small businesses across every industry can utilize Conversation Intelligence to drive actionable insights from call transcriptions, qualify and score incoming leads, identify keywords for marketing purposes, and more. The more your business grows, the more information you gather — and the more you understand your customers.

Through the power of AI, Conversation Intelligence is able to look out for common words and phrases mentioned by your customers. It can then perform a number of time-saving actions on your behalf, including tagging inbound or outbound calls and sorting them into useful buckets.

Automation rules can be used to apply a lead score, add tags, and more based on keywords spoken in a conversation

One t-shirt business is taking advantage of this feature. Before CallRail, the business forwarded all calls to a personal cell phone. These days, the company’s general manager oversees a small team and needs a bit more flexibility with which calls get sent to the right reps.

Conversation Intelligence gives him the ability to assign calls to the appropriate sales reps based on profitable, high-intent phrases like “bulk order,” “custom print,” and more.

Plus, with staffing shortages following the pandemic, the business was operating with a skeleton customer service team. Call routing combined with the ability to prioritize high value inquiries generated “tons of additional revenue” for the business, according to the general manager.

Listen to customer requests and adjust products and services accordingly

When a law firm in Austin received multiple calls about “scooter accidents,” the practice saw an opportunity to support these clients. Based on the strong upward trend in this CI-spotted keyword, the firm opened an entirely new line of business for scooter accidents.

The “Key terms” report shows the most commonly-spoken words and phrases at a glance

If you’ve found a new line of business successful, like this law firm did, you may be interested in running marketing campaigns based on these top keywords. You can utilize Conversation Intelligence’s keyword spotting to inform your website’s SEO strategy, digital ads, direct mail campaigns and more. When you find something that sticks, start putting some real muscle and budget behind it.

Your existing or prospective customers are the best resource to tell you what they want — and the more you listen to them and pick out key trends, the more you can find new customers with the same needs.

Keep your ear out for new trends automatically

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but the top keywords in your conversations won’t always be at the top. As businesses and customers evolve, so do their needs — especially when something happens at a global scale. This means you always have to be on the lookout for new trends.

Most small business owners and managers know what they should be on the lookout for, but they don’t have the time or resources to put the required attention towards those things. This is where Conversation Intelligence comes in, once again. You can program keywords you know you’re looking for — and phrases you weren’t aware of will be flagged, too, thanks to Conversation Intelligence’s powerful Call Highlights feature.

Call Highlights surface keywords you’re not yet tracking (but may want to)

Real estate professionals, for example, know they need to keep abreast of up-and-coming neighborhoods and developments on the market. If a prospective client calls in looking for “new construction” in an up-and-coming area — or explicitly name drops a wildly popular subdivision — you’ll have AI on your side proactively listening to your conversations. To take the most advantage of that help, set up workflows and Automation Rules to route those calls to the appropriate team member.

Similarly, an aesthetic healthcare practice may receive several calls requesting a particular beauty treatment. The clinic may want to further research the challenges clients are confronting and which treatments patients are requesting by name to determine whether they should bring a particular treatment to the clinic. Further, a patient may request a specific clinician due to referrals or personal preference, and you can route those calls appropriately, too.

Stay in tune with your sales team

If you own a small business in the home services industry, you might like to ensure your growing sales team is providing consistent information to new prospects. Let’s say you work in roofing — one of your main concerns is whether or not a deal closes and work can begin, or if someone chose one of your competitors over you. You want your sales team to be constantly up-to-date when it comes to pricing, timing, and how you excel compared to other roofing businesses.

Once you’ve trained your team on the process for managing the prospect pipeline, you might be tempted to just let them take things from there, but your sales leaders may want to support team members by joining calls when they have a free minute. This way, if something changes in your team’s availability or pricing and a sales rep is unaware, a sales leader can jump in and clarify.

With keyword spotting and automation rules, sales leaders can easily identify team members who need a little extra support or coaching — at scale, without having to listen to every individual call. Conversation Intelligence makes it simple to:

• Identify areas for call script and talk track improvement by knowing which calls are converting — and why.
• Improve and identify areas for coaching by tagging a call as ‘training opportunity’ if certain words of a talk track aren’t met.
• To identify high-performing reps, filter calls by agent then view the frequency specific key terms are spoken. For example, if a rep is required to say “my pleasure” on every single call, you’ll be able to visualize compliance based on the size of the cloud or the frequency relative to other keywords.

Call transcripts and keywords can identify conversations where a talk track was executed perfectly — or not so much

Learn from your most successful conversations and worst mistakes

“Can I speak to a manager?”

It’s not exactly the best direction for most calls… but why not find the silver lining and use the opportunity to come away with insights? With Conversation Intelligence, you can program phrases like these to automatically flag a conversation in a certain way. For example, if a customer uses the phrase “can I speak to a manager,” you could flag that conversation as “needs escalation.”

These kinds of calls happen to the best of sales and support reps, but with CallRail, you can always turn those calls into a learning opportunity.

You can use automation rules and keyword spotting to find your happiest, most loyal customers, too. If you’re an automotive company, it’s likely the people calling you are at least partially interested in purchasing a vehicle. With keyword spotting, you can see which promotional mentions, greetings, and sales pitches work best — even which cars are the most popular or easiest to sell.

Are you ready to learn from your most important source of data — your customers?

CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence has practical implications across a wide variety of industries, and the impact it can make is undeniable. Sign up for a free, 14-day trial of CallRail today.