invocaAs regulations like GDPR and CCPA put a stranglehold on the use of third-party consumer data sources, making sure you have access to actionable first-party data is more important than ever. While you probably have access to data like customer purchase history, website and other digital journey information like paid search interactions, there are limits to how much insight marketers can gather from these sources. Conversational analytics represents one of the last bastions of precise first-party insights into how customers interact with your brand, how they think of your product or service, and perhaps most importantly, exactly how they talk about it.

Conversational analytics is the process of extracting usable data from human speech and conversation using natural language processing (NLP) to allow computers to “understand” speech (e.g. phone calls and voice assistants) and typed speech (e.g. customer service chatbots), as well as artificial intelligence (AI), to extract and organize data from it. Read more on Invoca’s website how it is used in call tracking software that allows marketers to understand call context, predict outcomes, and apply the data to optimize marketing campaigns and improve customer experience.

One of the reasons that conversational AI is seen as a great first-party data source is that today’s consumers expect more than the purely digital “point-click-buy” transactions and are demanding blended experiences that bring conversations into the mix. In fact, 70% of consumers feel frustrated or angry when they do not have the choice of contacting a human representative. This means that businesses need better ways to listen. In order to hear and understand what your customers are saying at any sort of scale, you need conversational AI to make sense of and take action on the data.

Companies that frequently have conversations with their customers on the phone are sitting on a goldmine of customer data. They may have thousands of hours of customer phone calls every year and have tens of thousands of call recordings banked — just imagine the kind of customer data that is in all those calls. You will learn why they are calling, what makes a purchase happen, whether they are calling more often for service or sales, whether they are happy or mad — the possibilities are nearly endless. Then imagine manually wading through all those call recordings to gain insights on those calls. It is just not possible and as it turns out, it was challenging for computers to do it, too.

On the computer side, much of the difficulty in analyzing conversations lies in the many nuances of human speech. Unlike the formulaic equations and coded strings of commands computers usually deal with, human speech follows only a loose pattern and logic. Even if we are only talking about analyzing the English language, there are hundreds of different accents, inflections, phrase patterns, varying word usage, slang, and colloquialisms that even other people have a hard time understanding. New research shows that some elements of speech are hardwired in the human brain, but what really makes people different from machines is our ability to instantaneously process all of this variance of language. Creating a machine learning algorithm that can “learn” how to process human language is a whole different ball of wax.

When it comes to processing conversations in phone calls, which is what Invoca Signal AI conversational analytics does, things get even hairier. “Phone calls are idiosyncratic in the world of natural language processing,” said Invoca data scientist Mike McCourt. “They can be repetitive, can contain both recorded messages and human speech, and often suffer from bad connections.” On top of that, phone calls also contain both full conversations and sequences of simple yes/no answers, hold music, keypresses, silence, and many other variables that you do not see in textual communications. This makes it difficult to design AI software that can juggle so many competing needs.

Most well-known AI models for language are designed for either long, carefully edited texts like news articles, or for short, spontaneous speech like a Tweet or chatbot conversation. In our experience, none of these well-known models work on phone calls, which are both long and spontaneous. Since analyzing phone calls differs so starkly from the rest of the research community, we did our own research and develop our conversational AI algorithms. Invoca’s conversational analytics platform is designed to help marketers get a new view into conversation data from high-intent consumers — such as purchases made or promotion inquiries. Marketers can quickly gain new insights and get attribution from phone calls and take action on them in real time. It is used to drive more revenue-generating calls, boost conversion rates, and optimize the buying experience. Signal AI conversational analytics is most frequently used to:

  • Optimize ad spend: automatically adjust keyword bidding strategies and suppress ads in systems like Google Ads and Search Ads 360 for callers who convert over the phone
  • Seed audiences: create new audiences using offline conversion data to expand your reach of potential customers through native integrations with Facebook and Adobe Experience Cloud
  • Personalize content: update content management tools like Adobe Target to personalize content for each subsequent consumer visit based on call conversations


Compared to other conversational analytics tools, Signal AI offers marketers deeper insight into the unique conversations happening between a businesses’ buyers and agents — often uncovering conversation patterns and behaviors that marketers didn’t know existed — with consumer-level data that can be made actionable across marketing platforms.

Here’s how conversational AI works in Invoca’s call tracking platform:

 

whyStep 1: Call data flows into the Invoca platform during each conversation.
Step 2: The spoken data is transcribed into text so it can be analyzed by the algorithm.
Step 3: The predictive model analyzes the conversation and identifies key patterns, phrases, and actions, then identifies call outcomes such as ‘application submitted’ or ‘quote received’.
Step 4: Those outcomes and insights are pushed into your marketing stack so you can use this valuable conversation data to optimize marketing spend and personalize the customer’s next interaction — all in real time.

The latest addition to the Signal AI conversational analytics suite is Signal Discovery. Powered by unsupervised machine learning, Signal Discovery gives you an unprecedented view of phone conversations with your customers by automatically grouping customer conversations into topics based on similarities in speech patterns. This allows marketers to quickly gain new insights from tens of thousands of conversations and acting on them. There is no better way to get to know someone than having a conversation, and there is no better way to get to know your customers than by making conversational analytics part of your marketing tech stack. Feel free to download Invoca’s State of First-Party Marketing Data report.

By Owen Ray, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Invoca