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As we doom scroll our social media feeds, it’s hard not to feel like crises are everywhere. The pandemic, natural disasters, and public relations blunders unfold before our eyes in real time, twenty-four hours a day. Though it can be shocking for the human mind to take in all that carnage, at least we get some killer memes out of the bargain.
The chaos of the modern world can be especially challenging for businesses to navigate. It’s almost inevitable that, at some point, a crisis will hit your organization. It’s impossible to predict when a crisis will emerge or what form it will take, however, you can create a plan now to prepare yourself.
The foundation of any crisis management plan is the ability to gather feedback from your customers in real time so you can move quickly to address their concerns. However, it’s difficult to capture those insights and even more difficult to scale the process. That’s where conversation intelligence can help — it uses AI to tap into one of the richest sources of voice-of-the-customer insights: phone conversations.
Keep reading to learn what conversation intelligence is and how it can help you improve your crisis response strategy.
Conversation intelligence is software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to derive insights from phone conversations between your representatives and customers. The conversation data can be streamed between other technology platforms like CRMs, ad platforms, data analytics and attribution solutions, contact center software, and digital experience platforms in order to take action on the insights in real time.
It can be incredibly time-consuming to sift through mountains of voice-of-the-customer data, trying to identify patterns and trends. That’s why Invoca uses artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting and identify trends from your phone calls at scale. As a result, you can quickly get a pulse on what your customers’ needs, concerns, and pain points are and make the right pivots to improve the customer experience.
Phone calls are one of the richest sources of insights about your customers. During these interactions, they’re literally telling you what they need and how to make them happy. And when there’s a crisis, customers are even more likely to call so they can speak with a human being who can clear up their uncertainties and offer reassurance. In addition, phone calls are critical because they’re often your customers’ first point of human contact with your brand.
In the past, capturing insights from phone conversations wasn’t feasible or scalable — teams would have to listen to hours of call recordings to try to identify trends. But now, with conversation intelligence, you can use AI to analyze phone conversations at scale. This allows you to quickly identify trends and adjust your crisis management strategy accordingly.
For example, if you’re a financial services company and you’ve been hacked by ransomware, you can use conversation intelligence to learn what your customers are saying about the breach and how you can help. You may learn that your communications strategy has been ineffective and customers aren’t aware of the steps you’ve been taking to resolve the issue or what the current status is. Or you may learn that many customers are asking for free credit monitoring to ensure their identities are protected, and you could offer this service to put their minds at ease.
Below are some of the main benefits of using conversation intelligence AI for your crisis management strategy:
Phone calls are a rich source of insights about your customers. However, as mentioned above, there isn’t nearly enough time in the day to listen to every call your business receives. Invoca solves this problem by analyzing conversations at scale with artificial intelligence.
With Invoca Signal AI Studio, you can get out-of-the-box algorithms or train your own custom algorithms to detect conversion events, call outcomes, and other important conversational topics as soon as they happen. You can stream and activate your conversation data across hundreds of platforms as soon as the call ends to optimize bidding strategies, build targeting audiences, and enrich CRM and CDP data.
If you don’t know what phrases or key moments to look for, Signal Discovery can help. Powered by unsupervised machine learning, Invoca Signal Discovery automatically groups customer conversations into topics so you can easily identify trends from tens of thousands of conversations and take action on them in real time.
A key part of any crisis management strategy is guiding your customers through their fears and doubts. But this is easier said than done because, when a crisis is unfolding, you can’t exactly send out a pulse survey — your customers have far more pressing matters to deal with. Sure, you can monitor your social media channels, but that only tells part of the story.
Invoca fills this critical information gap with sentiment analysis. This feature allows you to pinpoint when callers express certain emotions, and you can then dig into the call transcripts and recordings to get more context. Most sentiment analysis tools only tell you if the overall sentiment of the call was positive or negative, which is hard to take action on. Invoca’s sentiment analysis is different because it separates the sentiment of the caller and the agent, and tracks how the sentiment changes throughout the call. This an especially valuable tool for crisis management, as you can quickly home in on moments where customers show uncertainty, fear, and doubt and see how well your agents are handling the situation and whether or not they are putting customers at ease by the end of the call. You can then take that data to make the right pivots to reassure your customers and clear up their anxieties.
When a crisis occurs, having real-time information is everything. Invoca conversation intelligence can help your team stay up-to-the-minute with its Smart Alerts capabilities. Smart Alerts notify you (or other stakeholders at your business) in real time when moments you care about occur on calls. Each alert includes a link to Invoca to view the recording and transcript of flagged calls so you can investigate further and quickly determine the best next step.
Smart alerts are powered by Invoca’s Signal AI technology, so they can notify you about virtually anything occurring on calls. They are also easy to configure – you simply decide what topic or metric you want an alert for, who gets it, when, and how often. For example, if you’re a telecom company experiencing service disruptions, you could set up an alert for when there’s a high volume of customers mentioning an outage or related terminology.
Learn more about Smart Alerts in this post
In times of crisis, the consequences can extend far beyond the immediate impact. Crises often lead to a loss of trust, changes in consumer behavior, and heightened anxieties among customers. In addition, it’s important to recognize that crises don’t impact every geographic region the same way — for example, during the COVID-19 crisis, regions often had different guidelines and safety procedures they needed to follow.
Invoca offers granular reporting which allows you to see conversation trends at each of your business locations. Separating your reporting by region allows you to understand which of your company’s branches are most impacted by the crisis and how consumer concerns vary depending on location. You can then use these insights to guide targeted crisis management responses at each location, so that consumers feel supported and reassured no matter what geographic region they live in.
If your company doesn’t respond to a crisis effectively, it could leave a lasting stain on your reputation in the form of poor reviews and reduced retention rates. These negative brand mentions can translate to millions in lost revenue down the line, as research shows that 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.
While it’s impossible to eliminate negative brand mentions entirely, your company can use conversation intelligence to get ahead of them. With Invoca, you can quickly identify calls where the crisis was mentioned and drill into the call recordings and transcriptions to understand if your agent stuck to the right talking points and alleviated the caller’s concerns.
If the agent didn’t handle the call correctly, you can quickly call back the customer and make amends — perhaps by offering a discount or special offer. You can also adjust your scripts to better handle future calls, as you learn how callers are responding to the crisis and what they’re asking about. This approach can prevent negative reviews and other blowback that could harm your reputation.
Learn more about reputation management in this post
Spectrum Retirement Communities is a leading operator of retirement, assisted living, and memory care communities. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Spectrum needed to implement a crisis management strategy to keep track of residents’ concerns and effectively communicate new safety procedures. To accomplish this, they turned to Invoca.
The team used Invoca’s AI-powered phrase spotting to zero in on phone conversations related to COVID-19 and the pandemic. This allowed them to keep a pulse on the tenor and tone of conversations around the pandemic and discover what residents and their families were concerned about at each facility.
“The insights from Invoca helped us make critical pivots in our response efforts,” said Shannon Johnson, the company’s director of marketing operations. Those pivots included adjusting the company’s website and communications to address the concerns of residents and their family members, such as safety precautions, visitation policies, and more. One of the key changes the team made was switching to virtual tours for prospective residents to maintain social distancing.
The result of these and other tough but necessary decisions for the business? Keeping the COVID-19 curve flat across Spectrum Retirement’s 50 properties. In fact, the company saw an infection rate of just 1% among all its team members and residents during the first six months of the pandemic.
“A key reason we’ve kept the curve flat was that we were able to use Invoca data to develop effective communications that helped people understand what they needed to do to stay safe,” said Johnson. “Whether you called our hotline, or you wanted to visit our website, or you received an email or letter from us, you got the same messaging.”
In addition, Invoca helped the team earn positive customer reviews and reduce resident turnover. “Our ability to communicate proactively using the Invoca platform and other channels led to our company receiving 160 positive reviews across our portfolio in the first six months of the pandemic,” said Arduino. “That tells us that families and residents are happy with how we’ve been able to provide care and respond to their concerns during this critical time.”
Johnson added, “I think another one of the most significant results for us during this crisis was seeing 20% lower resident turnover during the last six months of 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. I see that as proof of our crisis response strategy working — that our immediate, proactive communication style, our centralized messaging, and all our pivots and interventions along the way, made a difference.”
Read the full Spectrum Retirement Communities case study here
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you capture deep customer insights? Check out these resources:
