There are three common challenges for most Customer Success teams: spotting early churn indicators, missing upsell opportunities, and understanding why and how a conversation led to a particular outcome.
Most Client Success and Sales teams have access to tools that tell them what their clients are doing, but these tools fall short when it comes to telling them why their customers are taking a particular action. These tools can be a powerful resource for driving usage but don’t do a good job at helping reps really understand what’s happening in an account at a deeper level. Usage metrics only speak to one small part of an account’s health and other information, like likelihood to renew or customer delight, can go overlooked.
These important insights are often overlooked because they are trapped inside of customer interactions. They are hidden in the tone and sentiment of a customer’s voice on a call. Unless a rep is experienced in their role, they are likely to miss those signals. This is why Conversation Intelligence technology is starting to play a key role in helping sales and customer success departments really understand their client interactions.
Conversation Intelligence technology differs from most Customer Success (CS) and Sales tools because it focuses on human-to-human interactions. Conversation Intelligence software makes it easy for leadership to know exactly what reps are saying on calls; whether they’re demo-ing features and training customers correctly, why a customer is satisfied (or dissatisfied) and if their team is successfully spotting upsell and churn indicators. Conversation Intelligence (CI) software makes it easy to not only find this data but to also use it for rep development, onboarding, training and to supplement CRM data.
What is Conversation Intelligence Technology?
Conversation Intelligence (CI) technology ingests, transcribes, and analyzes call recordings, then leverages conversational AI components to provide key insights into what’s actually happening on calls. It’s used for call analysis across organizations from Sales to Marketing to Customer Success and even Product Teams. You can learn more about that here – What is Conversation Intelligence Technology?
Fight Churn with Conversation Intelligence Software
Every customer success or sales rep can recall a time where their reps wrongly interpreted the health of an account. The account was supposed to renew but instead, they churned. When you investigated why the account churned, you discovered that your reps overlooked or ignored the frustration and disinterest that was non-verbally communicated by their contact at the account.
Without a detailed understanding of customer interactions, everything might have looked okay from a usage standpoint, but it didn’t tell the whole story. The problem is that most Success tools look at key performance metrics like license utilization, platform engagement, and implementation time. This is great for spotting at-risk revenue and clear indicators of churn, but it won’t pick up on early, leading indicators of churn that may be present in client interactions. On the other hand, Conversation Intelligence software was created to pick up on those signals by identifying key words and phrases that are consistent with accounts likely to churn. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can then use this data to find the accounts that need more attention and begin working on a strategy to prevent the account from churning.
Leverage Insights from Conversation Intelligence Technology
In addition to fighting churn, Conversation Intelligence technology provides reps with access to all of their client interactions. This allows CSMs and sales reps to remain present and engaged on calls without having to scramble to take accurate notes. Sales and Success reps can then replay the call, looking for key moments that they may have missed like upsell opportunities, referral opportunities, and much more.
Success and sales teams dream of a world where every customer renews at the end of their contract. [Tweet this!] The reality is that there are a number of factors that contribute to whether or not an account renews. Conversation Intelligence technology helps CS and sales quickly uncover these insights by analyzing call sentiment (emotion) and identifying key words and phrases. Sales reps and CSMs can also utilize Conversation Intelligence platforms to review previous calls, giving them a clearer picture of an account’s satisfaction level before their next customer interaction.
Product Value & Interdepartmental Communication
Client success, sales, and leadership teams can track conversations within accounts to identify and understand where customers are finding the most value in your product. CSMs and sales reps can share portions of calls that contain feature suggestions and feedback directly with the product team, allowing a full understanding of what customers are saying.
Inversely, Conversation Intelligence technology allows users to share calls between departments, which can be helpful if a client is having difficulties using the product. Support teams can hear firsthand exactly what the customer is experiencing. This mitigates information that might get lost when CSMs pass on the customers’ experience to product managers and tech support. When a rep encounters a difficult situation, they can virtually raise their hand and share calls with their supervisor for assistance. Upsell opportunities are easily passed to the sales team for follow-up through call sharing as well.
Shortened Onboarding & Ramp Time for New Hires
Conversation Intelligence software improves the onboarding process and decreases ramp time for new Customer Success Managers. Onboarding a new CSM can be extremely time-consuming between training them on your product, reviewing customer use cases, and getting them acquainted with their accounts. Conversation Intelligence technology significantly shortens the process by allowing teams to build out best practice libraries. New hires can review these libraries and previous client calls to get up to speed on company processes and their accounts.
Conversation Intelligence (CI) also makes training more efficient. Listening to calls from the “wild” is much more practical and effective than any training manual, role-playing, or documentation. This technology takes the guesswork out of critical first customer interactions because the new CSM has already heard what makes a good call.
Want to learn more about Conversation Intelligence? See it live!
How an ExecVision CSM Utilizes Conversation Intelligence Software
You could say our Success and sales team members are big fans of Conversation Intelligence technology. Emma, a CSM on our team, has used CI across all of her roles with the company, from SDR to Support, and now in Success. She has found unbelievable value in this CI technology and genuinely believes it’s made her better in every role.
Emma uses Conversation Intelligence software to review and reflect on her own calls to see what she could do better and what’s working so she can improve future client interactions. She continues to work on improving by asking for feedback and help from her managers and peers.
As a CSM, Emma spends most of her day on screen shares or phone calls, answering questions or leading a training session. She knows how important accurate notes are, but sometimes forgets to update her CRM notes after. Conversation Intelligence software allows her to quickly review her calls to recap the most critical parts and refresh on next steps.
Best practice libraries have been instrumental in Emma’s learning, especially in her newest role. She refers to them whenever she’s in a slump or gets stuck on a problem because her peers have already experienced similar customer interactions.
Prior to her initial conversations with accounts, Emma reviews calls from the sales process. This allows her to get a full understanding of why the customer bought the product. This preparation gives her all of the ammo she needs to drive the value of the product and put together specific use cases that match the client’s goals and needs.
How are you currently tracking customer insights for your Customer Success team? How do you see Conversation Intelligence technology helping your CS team improve their client interactions?
