Conversational intelligence: what it is and how it transforms CX

By 2028, conversations will become central to how customers engage with brands, according to Gartner. They’ll rely primarily on third-party assistants—such as conversational AI agents—that answer product questions or solve technical issues. 

As digital touchpoints further expand, customer experience (CX) and support teams risk losing the full picture. Conversations often live in tools that don’t talk to each other, such as chat, email, phone, messaging apps, AI agents, and social channels. 

Conversation intelligence brings interactions across all touchpoints together and turns them into actionable insights. Read on to find out what it is, why it matters, and how it helps you make faster, more informed decisions to improve your CX now and beyond.

Key insights

• Smart CX and support teams leverage what customers share daily through live chats, phone calls, social comments, and online reviews using AI-powered conversation intelligence

• Advanced conversation intelligence tools and platforms like Loris layer different AI models to capture and interpret the complex nature of customer interactions

• Combining conversational intelligence with behavioral insights gives you a complete picture of customer sentiment, intent, and experience

What is conversation intelligence, and why does it matter for your CX?

Conversation intelligence is the technology that processes speech and text-based customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. Because these conversations usually live in tools and platforms that rarely communicate with one another, CX and support teams see only a fragmented view of the customer experience.

To improve your CX, you can rely on it to unify vast, unstructured data (the content of these interactions), such as

• Live chat and AI chatbot transcripts

• Sales call recordings

• Email threads or support tickets

• Social comments and direct messages

• Third-party online reviews

It then extracts keywords, customer sentiment, and other valuable insights from these sources, ready for real-time analysis.

Drilling down into these insights lets you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and deliver successful outcomes for both your customers and agents. And with AI-powered conversation intelligence platforms like Loris, it’s easier to uncover the big issues affecting your CX and make data-driven, impactful decisions.

How to transform CX using conversation intelligence and Loris

Conversation intelligence uses machine learning and natural language processing to account for the various factors shaping customer interactions. Loris takes this further by building specialized AI models that comprehend message-level sentiments and distinguish complex emotions. 

Here's how you can power your CX with customer and agent insights using a modern conversation intelligence platform:

1. Uncover customer insights

Surveys can shed light on why satisfaction dips or churn rises, but they only capture a small share of customer voices. That is, if responses aren’t skewed between very happy and extremely frustrated customers. 

On the other hand, collecting a large enough sample and combing through the data for patterns is far harder than anyone has time—or headcount—for.

This is where conversation intelligence platforms like Loris make a difference. Loris captures 100% of your interactions so you get accurate customer insights at speed. With full coverage, you can quickly spot emerging issues, prioritize the right fixes, and understand the sentiment behind every conversation.

Swift issue detection and resolution

Loris provides a 3-tiered hierarchy view of trending issues. This model enables your support team to detect exactly what’s happening and where:

• Area of Business: the team or department the issue belongs to. For example, compliance, disputes, and refunds

• Category: the type of issue customers are raising. For example, complaints or appealing a dispute

• Contact Driver: the specific problem that triggered the inquiry. For example, filing a complaint or reference to the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

Contact drivers shown in hierarchy view

This visualized, tiered approach to issue-spotting ensures agents find the information they need to meet customers where they are, so they feel more confident in resolving an issue or routing it to someone who can. 

⚡ Pro tip: surface important changes to customer satisfaction, trending issue volume, or conversation quality in seconds with Ask Loris. This AI-powered conversation intelligence tool reveals root causes of issues that drive churn or frustration.

In-depth sentiment analysis

Knowing a customer’s satisfaction level or the target of their negative sentiment helps your agents provide better service during interactions. Loris designed the following models for this purpose:  

• Customer Sentiment: a 5-tier scoring model that predicts how the customer feels (very dissatisfied to very satisfied) toward the agent’s service throughout the conversation. It captures context and nuances, which become the basis for the score.

• Sentiment Target Classification (STC): a model that categorizes the target of non-neutral messages into 3—the agent, the company, or both. Determining the source of negative sentiments can shift the focus from addressing individual agents to improving the overall customer service.

2. Surface agent insights

Traditional QA forms and scorecards review only a small sample of interactions, so they can’t fully reflect your agents’ performance. Loris’s automated quality intelligence analyzes every interaction to ensure a holistic understanding of their impact on customer service and experience.

You can use these insights to set up a quality assurance (QA) process your entire team can trust and provide coaching that inspires results.

Automated quality assurance 

Loris QA lets you set rules that are easy to understand and explain to your QA analysts and agents. Analysts can then use deviations from expected behavior to assess human and AI agents. Agent actions also have an impact on customer and efficiency metrics—all of which your QA team can view on the Agent Insight dashboard. 

Agent Insight offers a holistic view of agent impact on customer interactions

Reliable human and AI agent coaching

The quality of agent responses—whether human or AI-powered—directly impacts retention. One leading food ordering and delivery app found, through conversation intelligence, that a single negative interaction could drop their reorder rate by -10% for loyal customers. 

Loris CoPilot helps you change your conversation quality from hit-or-miss to consistently great.

This AI agent auto-tags every inbound conversation by reason or sentiment. Then, it suggests tone and workflows based on playbook practices or your A/B test results. It’s like having a real-time guide who gives your agents summaries so they’ll know the right thing to say, at the right time. Bottom line: customers walk away feeling taken care of.

Case study: Calendly supercharges customer support with Loris

Calendly, a leading online scheduling automation platform, has achieved significant success in partnering with Loris AI. The support team first implemented Loris Copilot to assist agents and immediately reduced average handle time by 3 minutes. This brought down their cost per case by -23%.

Additionally, Loris’s conversation intelligence and VoC capabilities have saved the company countless hours of manual data collection and analysis, helped it enhance QA and coaching, and given it confidence to improve their customer support operations.

Loris CoPilot guides agents by showing customer sentiment in live chats or emails

At the same time, AI Insight highlights agents’ strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to start deeper conversations on how they can improve, step up, and deliver value.

Take data-driven action across the customer journey

Conversation intelligence enables different teams to collaborate and make faster, smarter decisions. Access to the same comprehensive insights empowers CX teams—from support to product—to fill gaps in the customer experience from end to end.

With Loris Copilot, support teams can perform analytics on autopilot and provide structured feedback to other teams so

• Product and engineering can identify recurring pain points and prioritize fixes

• Design and UX can understand how friction—think confusing navigation or non-intuitive buttons—makes customers feel

• Marketing can weave the exact phrases customers use into their content and messaging

Meanwhile, these teams can generate meaningful, shareable insights in seconds with Sense Analyst, Contentsquare’s autonomous AI agent. For example, using behavioral insights, they can enhance help center content, so customers can self-serve. 

This feedback loop leads to faster issue resolutions, increased product use and value, more consistent messaging on marketing channels, and continuous improvements across the board.

📣  In case you missed it: Contentsquare’s acquisition of Loris AI paves the way for brands to bridge traditional online journeys with human and AI-powered conversations. Learn how you can harness this advanced technology using the framework and tools below.

FAQs about conversation intelligence