Constellation ShortList™ Conversational Intelligence for Customer Service

Conversation intelligence for customer service solutions enable organizations to ingest, summarize, transcribe and analyze a broad array of converstaions held across customer service channels. These solutions then work identify actionable insights that drive business decisions. Thanks to powerful AI techniques and models from large language models, natural language processing and generative AI modes, when conversation intelligence is applied in a customer service/support or contact center environment, the velocity of decisions and actions an organization can take can be dramatically accelerated.

Core to conversational intelligence tools for customer service is the quality, scope and performance of the artificial intelligence engines at the core of customer conversation analysis and understanding. While these conversational tools have long been part of the CX ecosystem, the inclusion of generative AI and advanced language understanding thanks to large language models has accelerated the capacity to ingenst conversations, translate and transcribe, analyze and extract intelligence in more ways than ever before. Sentiment analysis is enriched with a clearer understanding of context. Topic extraction across a vast quantity of conversation can now kick off automated workflows to extend intelligence sharing, continue relationship building communications or connect cross functional teams with the high fidelity voice of the customer.

Expect for this space to continue to evolve as communications being analyzed will not just include customer engagements with human agents in service desks and contact centers, but also with self-service virtual agents as agentic AI turns fairly simplistic exchanges between customers and bots into far more robust bi-directional conversations forever changed (and enhanced) thanks to genAI capabilities.

Many contact center as a service (CCaaS), customer service management (CSM) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions now include robust conversational intelligence tools that are a critical part of their offering. Arguably solutions like NICE, Verint, Genesys, Five9, Salesforce, Zendesk, or AWS could hold spots on this shortlist. However, Constellation Research narrowed the focus for this list to only include conversational intelligence solutions that were not part of a larger customer experience platform.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Call recording, transcription and (increasingly) translation of customer interactions across voice calls and digital chat conversations. These call captures can include conversations with live human or virtual agents and may include emails, social media and digital messaging channels. 
• Capacity to ingest conversation from written and video based communications channels also critical to a holistic intelligence base. 
• Documented and measurable transcription accuracy to ensure reliable conversation tracking, analysis 
• Topic, conversation and insight extraction that can identify and summarize key points of conversation and key topics discussed in customer conversations. 
• Analysis and evaluation of agent performance including assessment of conversational stypes, completeness of conversation and resolution, adherence to brand standards and scripts and the ability to resolve issues, build relationships and meet customer and organization expectations. 
• Capacity to deliver real-time insights on conversations to agents while providing summarized intelligence to cross functional teams including product development, sales and marketing 
• Integrations into CCaaS, CRM and customer service clouds including capacity to share and transfer data, customer insights and conversation highlights to core systems of customer record 
• Ability to expand quality assurance operations to ingenst and analyze 100% of calls and communication 
• Dashboards to visualize key customer service performance metrics to enhance and optimize performance 
• Automations to deliver real-time recommended actions or initiate workflows to continue engagements and positive customer interactions (eg: automated follow up scheduling, automated coaching for employees, proactive flagging of potential issues or customers at risk for churn.) 
• Ability to share feedback and recommended coaching actions with supervisors and agents 
• Privacy and compliance controls to adhere to global legislative and regulatory demands. Solutions must include rule-based and role-based permissions and limitations to access data 
• Capacity to scale up or down based on conversation and engagement volumes or channel expansions 
• Roadmap to include enhanced capabilities in globalization and translations, expansion of model management (pre-trained models, access to LLMs, advanced techniques for fine tuning or industry-specific retrieval augmented generation (RAG).