DYK # 33: Did you know … that Conversational Intelligence is going to be your next best friend?

If you work in Customer Experience (CX), you’ve probably heard of the term Conversational Intelligence (CI). While CI isn’t new per se, what’s new is how widely it’s being adopted and the range of CX use cases it now supports.

Let’s start at the beginning. 

First things first, conversational intelligence isn’t actually the same as conversational AI. 

Conversational AI 

Conversational AI is a set of technologies that enable us to understand, process, and respond to human language in a natural, conversational way. It powers chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice interfaces by combining natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and sometimes speech recognition.

Conversational Intelligence

Conversational intelligence (CI) is the discipline of using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze human dialogue in real time. Think of calls, chats, emails, etc. It goes beyond capturing words to interpret intent, sentiment, tone, and context, transforming everyday customer interactions into structured insights. 

Unlike surveys or traditional analytics, CI draws directly from the unfiltered conversations customers already have with you across voice, chat, and digital channels. The result is a continuous data feed about what your customers need, how they feel, and where your organization can improve. 

VoC implications 

If you’re familiar with Voice of Customer (VoC) programs, you may be wondering now how that fits into your world. 

CI enables you to incorporate every day conversations into your VoC or insights program, and augment your traditional program. Think of CI as text analytics on steroids. 

It also means that customer insights no longer solely come from research / surveys or your Insights team, it comes directly from the Contact Center! 

And that brings with it some other fun facts - you can read more about this here (DYK # 28).

Today though, we’re looking into the vendor landscape around CI tech. 

Converging or confusing vendor landscape ? 

CI has a variety of rather handy use cases for us in CX; I just mentioned insights above. But even within CX, CI use cases can vary from analysing contact center conversations to support customer service teams, automating tasks, to extracting operational or strategic insights for the wider business. 

With a large variety of use cases also comes a wide playing field for vendors. While vendor choice can be an advantage for organisations, it can also confuse and overwhelm leaders. 

So let's look into some of the vendors and their main internal audience:  

• VoC platforms such as InMoment, Medallia, Qualtrics, etc.: Traditionally focused on survey data and survey verbatim (via text analytics and sentiment analysis), these platforms now also include CI capabilities to extract insights from a variety of data sources, including the contact center. Their main focus is on extracting operational and strategic insights to inform continuous improvement and CX enhancements across the business. Their main audience is typically Insights / Research teams, CX, or sometimes Marketing and Product teams. 

• “Text Analytics” players such as Thematic or Chattermill: I differentiate “text analytics” players from VoC platforms as these vendors tend to focus on analysing data and specialising in unstructured data, rather than offering an end-to-end VoC platform. These vendors are champions in analysing unstructured and often unsolicited data, and moved from pure text analytics to conversational intelligence. They differ from conversational intelligence players as their main audience tends to be Insights, CX or Product teams, rather than Customer Service.  

• Pure CI players: Creovai, Operative Intelligence, etc.: They were often born in a contact centre environment, focused on extracting insights from contact centre conversations for contact centre teams, and often for operational purposes, rather than strategic business insights. However, with the evolution of CI applications, these vendors now also support wider teams across the business with strategic customer and business insights. 

• Contact centre vendors e.g. Zoom, NiCE, Verint (bots), etc.: Traditional contact center technologies that now include CI capabilities. Being at the center of the contact centre conversations, these vendors capitalised on the treasure trove they’re sitting on. However, most vendors in this category still heavily focus on supporting contact center teams (think agent coaching, support on the call, simple automations, etc.), rather than the entire organisation with customer insights. 

• CRM vendors like Salesforce, Zoho, etc.: Similar to Contact Center vendors, CRMs are sitting on a goldmine of customer data and raw insights. While often focused on basic reporting and analytics on structured data, CRM vendors have evolved their analytics to include CI capabilities as well.  

There might be some more, and I’m sure the landscape keeps evolving, but hopefully that provides a short little snapshot of the vendor landscape. 

It’s important to note that determining which vendor or solution is best for you will depend on your specific needs and internal use cases. No one size fits all, and as always with tech, just because it works for your competitors, doesn't mean it's going to be the right one for you. 

Choose wisely and be clear on your requirements and the use cases / problems you're trying to address. 

Shameless plug, for independent advice you know where to find us 😉

So what does this mean for you? 

The rise of conversational intelligence marks a turning point for CX leaders. Instead of relying on what customers remember or choose to share after the fact, or trolling through endless emails, chat conversations and call transcripts, you can now listen directly to what your customers say, when they say it. 

That means instant insights and actionable advice, rather than tons of data. It changes what we consider customer insights, how we extract insights from data, and who benefits from it. 

Valuable feedback is hidden in the conversations already happening every day. In this new era, the “voice of your customer” is no longer a program that’s stuck in the Insights department. It’s a mindset that enables you to truly listen to your customer every single day, and inform actions for every team across your organisation. 

And that's a CX mindset shift, powered by tech. 

Questions or comments? For more detailed insights or more tailored advice, don’t be shy to get in touch with us 🙂📩

#CX #customerexperience #VoC #technology #AI #conversationalintelligence