How conversation intelligence is transforming video conferencing

If you are in sales, chances are you’ve been on a video conference. Video conferencing applications have become a necessity in the business world and are a staple in every company’s technology stack.

The prevalence of video is perhaps the most noticeable within sales itself. As the inside sales model firmly establishes itself as the industry standard, the usage of video conferencing applications for meetings, demos, and even internal communications has increased exponentially. In fact, between 2013 and 2015, the video conferencing market grew 87 percent, and it is expected to reach $41 billion by 2022.

There is a reason why these applications have experienced so much growth: they drive real results. Zoom recently conducted a global study which determined that 92 percent of executives believe video conferencing has a positive effect on performance. The same study had 84 percent of companies claim that video conferencing was the norm for communication with external stakeholders.

Video conferences are here to stay, but the technology will continue to evolve. One of those evolutions is happening now, with the advent of conversation intelligence tools.

Conversation intelligence now extends to video conferencing

Conversation analysis platforms already provide numerous benefits for sales and support teams over the phone. This includes note-taking, data recording, and conversational analysis for coaching, performance improvement, and sales effectiveness. Since video conferencing platforms are a natural progression in the communication process, conversation analysis platforms now extend into video.

The benefits of conversation intelligence for video

Rather than requiring a user to dial into video meeting with their conversation intelligence platform, these integrations provide a direct “mainline” into the feed, so the entirety of the conversation information can be recorded, transcribed, analyzed, and stored. This not only provides significant time saving and convenience benefits, but it guarantees every single piece of call data from the customer lifecycle, from the first cold call dial, all the way through to ongoing support and upsells, is captured.

Full conversation recording and analytics

Perhaps one of the most noteworthy benefits is the ability to capture conversation analytics from sales demos, which reps commonly perform via screen share over video conferences. Using this technology, sales reps and their managers can capture data surrounding talk-to-listen ratios, keywords, interruptions/overtalk, timing, and even sentiment. The ability to surface this information can transform sales teams, as they will have the ability to actively target coaching opportunities, identify trends, and provide the ability for real self-improvement.

Sales managers can mine and create reports from conversation intelligence to monitor and improve rep performance. Want to catch consistent trends over the last 15 videoconference demos? How about identifying coaching opportunities and potential issues before they lead to a loss?

Just as your car may remind you of preventative maintenance or warn you if a more serious issue develops, conversation analytics can detect an alter a sales manager to an impending issue or improvement opportunity with one of their sales reps.

The reps themselves can leverage their personal call analytics information to understand how they compare against their peers, so they can actively identify areas of improvement on their own. Reps can also easily refer to call libraries to help improve specific skill areas outside of coaching sessions.

Just as the Human Genome Project gave us the ability to understand what makes us human, video and conversation analytics grants sales teams the capability to gather, understand, and architect what makes them successful.

Automated note-taking and recording

Automatic Zoom call transcription also provides a number of productivity and time saving benefits.

Reps won’t have to worry about taking notes, which are especially arduous when on a video call, as they must be done on a second screen, or a rep must actively put their head down and look away as they write. Those handwritten notes must then be deciphered and typed into Salesforce, which rarely happens and causes important information to be lost. Since the conversation analytics platform will maintain both and audio recording and searchable text transcription of the conversation, the role of notes in video calls will change, and become much more tactical rather than critical.

The Zoom call recording also serves as a key reference material for several essential points in a sales reps’ career. Beginning with onboarding, new reps can listen to calls and learn pitching, placement, and the processes from current sales all-stars simply by listening to their top calls. Established reps can see how their peers handle objections, deal with competitors, or simply brush up on their tactics. Managers can even implement peer-to-peer sales coaching. The inclusion of video conversations ensures that every conversation can be referenced, so reps have the ability to improve every aspect of their sales process and score more wins.

The usage of video conferencing only continues to grow, as more meetings, demos, and check-ins are done via video. Therefore, it is natural that conversation intelligence extends to these platforms so users can benefit from voice analytics regardless of where the conversations take place.