By Scott Bleasdell, Vice President of Product, CallRevu

Every phone call in and out of the dealership conveys important information. This information might include: Why is a potential customer calling? What’s holding a customer back from setting an appointment or purchasing? Why is this person unhappy? Is the customer expecting a callback?

Conversational intelligence (CI) analyzes and deduces actionable insights from conversations between a dealership’s staff and customers. For dealers, these insights are critical for turning leads into sales, saving deals, and understanding the customer experience at their dealership.

Traditionally, CI has been managed by humans. But the recent integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into the CI process has taken the ability to analyze and provide insights into buyer needs, phone engagement, and overall experience with the dealership to a new level. With human input and feedback, artificial intelligence learns incredibly fast. For dealers, the benefits to be gained from this technology are tremendous.

Large call volumes. Conversational intelligence captures, analyzes and summarizes the content of every phone conversation — from all phone lines connecting to the dealership. Rest assured that you will never miss another lead as long as the solution is well-integrated with your phone system and calls are being answered.

Traditional CI solutions listen to some, most or randomly chosen phone calls. This strategy fails to deliver a complete picture of what is happening in your dealership. When you incorporate AI with your CI system, you now benefit from a robust system that works 24/7.

Speed wins. While humans are good at analyzing calls and writing summaries, we are inherently slow. Sometimes it takes minutes or even hours before a dealer receives an alert that a phone call didn’t go well. At that point, it might be too late to remedy the situation.

AI engines have the capability to process phone calls in less than 10 seconds. This means the dealer will receive critical alerts and call summaries within minutes and sometimes even seconds. Leveraging AI technology with your CI solution is highly effective in staying ahead of potential customer challenges that might develop based on a poor phone experience.

Surface problem calls. Despite your staff’s best efforts, communication breakdowns occur. The result is often an unhappy customer. When a sales call is poorly handled, you need to quickly reach out to the customer to try and save the deal.

AI has come a long way in identifying how the tone of voice and certain words or phrases convey emotions. If there’s a problem, you’ll know about it. Utilize this information so you can adapt how you engage with the customer and identify any potential lessons learned for professional staff coaching.

Consistent information. Because humans have different backgrounds and life experiences, we interpret interactions in different ways. Even with established guidelines, discrepancies can occur with call analyses. Two people can listen to the same phone call, and one will decide there is a problem, while the other decides it is no big deal.

Conversational intelligence, enhanced with AI, provides better consistency as analyses are measured by one “brain.” Additionally, call summaries are consistent in how they are written, with no variations in cadence or style and no spelling or grammar mistakes. Accessing a complete history of every call with accurate information creates a more meaningful experience for every caller.

Rapid advances. We are entering a new era of conversational intelligence. Machines are learning from themselves and the input and feedback of humans at an incredibly fast pace. The more they learn, the better they get.

CI machines understand a variety of dialects and slang words, whereas a year ago, they needed help in that regard. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between call summaries written by machines and summaries written by humans.

The integration of AI into the conversational intelligence process makes it an incredibly exciting time for dealers, who will benefit from better, faster insights that can help them turn more leads into sales, save more deals and provide a better customer experience.