Did you know that conversation analytics software can make data-driven decisions that are 19X more likely to be profitable for your business?

With a conversation intelligence like Hear, CX leaders can collect and analyze 100% of customer conversations from emails, voice and text messages, social media, phone calls, VAs, and chatbots instantly.

Outcome: your fingers on your customer’s pulse, and their loyalty to you.

In today’s guide, find out the features, benefits, and costs of 7 conversational intelligence software to help you make lightning-fast business decisions and keep the needle turning. 

What is Conversation Analytics Software?

Conversation analytics software is a tool that uses AI to analyze unstructured conversations between customers and businesses collected via live chats, emails, phone calls, messaging platforms, video conferences, and social media. 

Such software uncovers customer insights, sentiments, intentions, preferences, and trends in real time to drive immediate action. 

Conversation Analytics vs. Conversation Intelligence vs. Speech Analytics

Although conversation analytics and conversation intelligence are used interchangeably, there’s a difference between the two. 

Conversation analytics collects and analyzes data to reveal the content. For example, it examines the frequency of keyword mentions or the number of times a customer intended to cancel. While it’s more quantitative, conversation intelligence is more qualitative. 

Conversation intelligence provides context to the content. Through the application of advanced AI technologies (Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing), it uncovers the emotions of the conversation. 

For example, conversation intelligence analyzes frequent competitor brand mentions as a negative sentiment, resulting in lost deals. Based on such insights, it also provides action points to improve your product or sales pitch. 

Speech analytics analyzes only voice conversations from recorded or live audio using NLP and  ML to gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment, trends, engagement, and experience. 

Benefits of Conversation Analytics Software

Conversation analytics tools provide the following benefits:

• Streamlines Operations: In a survey of 700+ executives, 28% reported that the biggest benefit of using AI in CX is reduced costs. Instead of manual processing of surveys, instant analyses save time and resources.
• Improves Sales Performance: Conversational analytics software analyzes and categorizes customers by their trends, preferences, pain points, and sentiments. Thus, it improves sales performance by ensuring a sales pitch that won’t miss. 

Pro Tip: Create a call center agent performance scorecard to track and evaluate agent effectiveness.

• Improves CX: When an agent has the customer’s past interactions, concerns, preferences, and issues on the dashboard, they can offer a tailored solution, leading to improved customer satisfaction by up to 20%.
• Improves Marketing Communication: Conversation intelligence tools analyze customer behavior during the entire journey from awareness to purchase and share deep insights. Based on these, marketing messages are tailored to every stage of the journey to attract the customer.
• Improves Agent Coaching: Studies show that 50-70% of the time, sellers give a different reason for losing a deal than the customers. By tracking and analyzing chats, conversation intelligence tools pinpoint areas for agent coaching improvement, leading to enhanced customer engagement.
• Drives Product Strategy: With regular feedback from customers on specific product or service issues and patterns, the product development team can offer better or innovative solutions.
• Breaks Language Barriers: Global businesses utilize conversation analytics tools to interpret customer preferences and insights from around the world, regardless of the language. Brands can use this data to create regional and localized customer experiences. 
• Manages Risk: Financial institutions handle sensitive customer information. With the help of conversation analytics services, it’s possible to identify suspicious behavior and prevent fraud.  
• Ensures Compliance: With conversation analytics tools working in real-time, it’s possible to detect if the customer service agent violates internal policies and industry standards. The outcome is quick action to address it immediately.
• Reduces data dependence: When you can get a conversation analytics software to work for you with what the customers have told your business directly, you don’t need to spend on third-party data or reports. 

How Conversation Analytics Software Works

Conversation analytics software works in 3 steps:

1. Data Collection and Clean-up: After collecting customer data from all channels and transcribing voice messages into text, AI deletes unnecessary words, punctuation, and special characters.
2. AI Application and Interpretation: Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning are applied to the data set to uncover context, topics, keywords, patterns, sentiments, and intent. In this stage, you get the “why” behind the data.
3. Insights and Report Generation: Here, the conversational intelligence software presents the insights and analysis in a digestible format consisting of dashboards, alerts, and reports. 

7 Best Conversation Analytics Software Tools

Let’s find out the features, benefits, and cost of the 7 best conversation analytics software:

1. Hear

Use Case:

• Sales
• Coaching 
• Customer Service
• Product Development

Features & Benefits:

• Complete conversation analysis: With this feature, you can provide tailored solutions and improve team performance.
• Compliance: When it’s critical to prevent info or policy breaches, this has you covered.
• Intuitive conversation intelligence platform: No more manual, complex data analysis with this feature.
• Adaptable conversation intelligence platform: Customizable reports tailored to specific use cases are a breeze with this aspect. 
• Seamless integration: When conversation analytics software fits CRM, sales, and marketing automation tools, you can drive quick strategies and action plans. 
• Proactive intelligence system: A helpful feature to share timely warnings for prompt action. 

Cost:

You can request a demo to get the cost and also learn about the capabilities of Hear.

2. Gong

Use Case:

• Sales
• Coaching
• Customer Service

Features & Benefits:

• Call recording: A great feature to keep call logs and serve as a ready reference.
• Call transcription: A must-have feature to correctly transcribe conversations to attach meaning and context. 
• Emails: Easily track sales deals conducted over email for fast closing. 
• Interaction insights: Sharpen your sales pitches with deep insights from this function. 
• Team Activity: The tracking of team activities is essential to spot the gaps and improve team performance. 
• Deal Warnings: As soon as there is any negative signal from the customer, the team ensures timely intervention and better communication strategies.
• Call Spotlight: Highlight the key takeaways from calls for speedy action with Call Spotlight.
• Ask Anything: Identify high-impact areas for a tighter strategy and better rep outreach quality with Ask Anything. 

Cost:

• Not disclosed on the website.
• License fee per user (user between 1 - 10,000+).
• Platform fee based on user number.
• No cost for integration.

3. Jiminny

Use Case:

• Sales 
• Coaching
• Team Performance
• Operations 

Features & Benefits:

• Accurate call recording and transcription: Without this feature, it’s impossible to move the sales needle and improve customer service. 
• Real-time dashboards: Get real-time quick fixes to improve customer engagement and areas for improvement.
• Pipeline management: View the customer journey stage to improve engagement, sales, and identify and fix problems instantly. 
• Automated CRM logging: Automatically record all CRM inputs, cut manual labor, save time, and prevent errors with this function. 
• Automated competitor intelligence: For a sharper sales, marketing, and product strategy, this feature shares what your competitors are doing. 
• Secure and compliant: A business runs zero risk of policy or industry standards breaches with this feature. 
• Integration with sales and marketing software: All customer conversation analyses are integrated with sales and marketing software and organized in one platform.

Cost:

• Not disclosed on the website.
• Free trial available.

4. Chorus by ZoomInfo

Use Case:

• Sales
• Customer Service
• Team Development
• Coaching
• Marketing

Features & Benefits:

• Sales call analysis: A basic feature to collect and analyze customer interactions for a better CX.
• Onboarding and sales enablement: Cut down new hire times and speed up the team's skill levels. 
• Deal intelligence and relationship management: A clever aspect of this software that identifies the most valuable customers and drives business growth. 
• Market intelligence: Understand your competitors’ moves and craft a better strategy. 
• Connected intelligence: Another characteristic is that it integrates with marketing automation tools for focused strategies and fast action.

Cost:

• Free trial available.
• Pricing plan on request.

5. Avoma

Use Case:

• Sales
• Customer Service
• Coaching
• Operations

Features & Benefits:

• Live Answer Assistant: Improve customer relations and team performance effectively. 
• Customizable AI Call Scoring: Free up the time of managers by focusing on low scorers only. 
• Talk-Pattern Insights: A key feature that crafts a better coaching scope. 
• Smart Trackers and Customizable Alerts: These help improve strategies, communication messages, and prevent customer churn.  
• Usage Activity and Engagement Insights: With this feature, you can measure agent and customer interactions and get higher team productivity.
• Smooth integration with multiple platforms: Another characteristic that helps drive efficient and effective business strategies.

Cost:

• Free trials available for Startups and Organization tiers. 
• Startups @ $19 per user per month (billed annually).
• Organization @ $29 per user per month (billed annually).
• Enterprise @ $39 per user per month (billed annually).
• Conversation Intelligence @ $29 per user per month (billed annually).
• Revenue Intelligence @ $29 per user per month (billed annually).
• Free viewer seats.

6. Zendesk

Use Case:

• Customer support
• Sales
• Operations 
• IT
• HR

Features & Benefits:

• Intuitive and customizable reporting: A must-have feature to ensure smooth and fast cross-team collaboration and action. 
• Real-time monitoring and feedback: If you want your staff to be better utilized and properly equipped for improving strategies and customer service, this feature is a must. 
• Tracking key metrics in real time: With this feature, you are sure to enhance customer engagement and improve team performance.

Cost:

• Free trial available
• Support Team @ $19 per agent per month (billed annually)
• Suite Team @ $55 per agent per month (billed annually)
• Suite Professional @ $115 per agent per month (billed annually)
• Suite Enterprise @ $169 per agent per month (billed annually)

7. SalesLoft

Use Case:

• Sales
• Customer Support
• Team Development
• Marketing

Features & Benefits:

• AI-assisted Scorecards: An invaluable feature to improve coaching efficiency. 
• Automated Summaries and Action Items: Save time through automation.
• Conversation Key Moments: Spot the right moments to improve chances of closing deals. 
• Tracker Trends: Quickly detect room for improvement and opportunities to take fast action. 
• Call Recording and Transcription: Automatically store conversation logs for easy reference. 

Cost:

• On request.

Essential Features to Look for in Conversation Analytics Software

The following are the key features to look for before investing in conversation analytics services.

• Smooth integration:  Make sure the conversation analytics software integrates without a hitch with your CRM and sales tools. 
• Instant data sync: There should be instant sync and two-way communication between the analytics software and CRM model to capture and analyze all data.
• Automated integration: The conversation intelligence tool should automatically integrate call logs, summaries, and next steps into the CRM software.
• Accurate and instant transcription: Precise and instant transcription is a must in foreign language, low-bandwidth, and/or noisy landscapes. 
• Precision: There must be correct context, industry-related topics, and keyword recognition. 
• On-the-go visibility: On-the-go dashboard display, alerts, and feedback systems must be in place. 
• Automated scoring and correlation:  Conversation scoring, how customer chats impact wins or losses, and team performance reports must be automated. 
• Customizable dashboards and reports: These should be customizable according to use cases. 
• Coachable moments identification: The software should identify gaps in the agent’s knowledge and skills for better coaching opportunities. 
• Security and compliance: A must-have feature to ensure adherence to standard regulations and policies.
• Easy to navigate: The user interface should be friendly and simple to use. 
• Access from mobile phones: The user should have the flexibility to access the software from their mobile phone, anytime, anywhere. 
• Regular updates and after-sales support: Regular software updates and after-sales support are essential to keep up with changes.

How to Choose the Right Conversation Analytics Software for Your Business

Choosing the right conversation analytics services starts with defining your business goals and objectives. Once you have that down, look for the following attributes:

• Accuracy: Get an accurate transcription of conversations, industry-specific context, and analysis instantly for quick action. 
• User-friendliness: The conversation intelligence services must be easy to use without getting too technical. Easily customizable reports and dashboards are key to leveraging the analytics software.
• Smooth Integration: Double-check that it integrates with your CRM and other business systems seamlessly, and gives a clear map of the customer journey for more meaningful engagement. 
• Scalability: When your business grows, the analytics tool must accommodate the changing dimensions easily. 
• Compliance and Security: Make sure it has HIPAA or GDPR security and compliance to avoid data breaches and legal complications. 

Implementation Best Practices

It’s not enough to install conversation analytics tools. Follow the steps below for the perfect implementation.

1. Test the Tool: Do a test run with your current data set to ensure the conversation analytics software is worth your time and money.
2. Define Business Objectives: Set SMART business goals so that you can measure the outcome. Instead of setting broad objectives like increasing customer satisfaction or agent efficiency, specify whether you want to increase the customer effort score or the average handle time, for example. 
3. Choose the Right Analytics Software: Depending on your business objectives, pick the right conversation analytics tool based on the discussion in the earlier section. 
4. Integrate with Current Business Systems: Integrate the new conversation intelligence system with your current CRM and other customer-related software to track customer sentiments, topics, and intent. 
5. Set Up Your Analysis and Tracking Parameters: Refer to the business goals and configure the software to track the metrics to measure your progress. 

For example, if you want to identify customer sentiments, set the system to track and analyze whether the customer chats are positive, negative, or neutral.

1. Repeat the Processes of Analyzing, Taking Action, and Measuring: Set a weekly or fortnightly alert to review reports and dashboards to uncover insights, sentiments, issues, topics, and trends. 

Take action based on these findings. Measure the outcome against your business goals. Tweak your business strategy if needed and repeat the process. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

These are some frequently asked questions regarding conversation analytics tools. 

Can Conversation Analytics Be Used In Remote Work Environments?

Yes. As the conversation analytics software is integrated across CRM and other sales and customer channels, it can be accessed and used remotely to monitor, implement, and measure sales and call center quality assurance metrics. 

Can Conversation Analytics Integrate With Marketing Automation Tools?

Yes, conversation intelligence tools can integrate with marketing automation tools either directly or through a third-party platform. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot can integrate with conversation intelligence tools.

How Long Does It Take to See ROI From Conversation Analytics?

In general, ROI from conversation analytics is visible within 6 months. 

However, it’s possible to see results in 3 months in industries that run on data. For example, fintech, healthcare, insurance, and e-commerce. The more data is fed to the software, the faster the path to ROI.

ROI from conversation analytics can be divided into three categories: strategic, operational, and financial. So, it depends on which type of ROI the business wants to measure. 

Conclusion

To keep your clients happy and your bottom line happier, the only way is to make data-driven decisions. 

With a conversation analytics software like Hear, you can gain instant customer insights, patterns, trends, topics, pain points, and sentiments, and act instantly to turn the tide to your favor. As long as your business objectives are clear, you can choose the right conversation analytics tool to give you the winning edge.

‍Book a demo today to see what Hear can do for your business.