Harnessing the “voice of the customer” has long-been touted as a true business enabler in order to provide better customer experiences. Indeed listening to customers in the their own words can help inform product strategy, elevate customer engagement and drive business impact.

To that end, call tracking and analytics provider Invoca recently unveiled Signal Discovery, a new tool for marketers to gain insights from customer conversations. (The company also announced last week a new $56M round of funding.) An extension of the Signal AI product suite, Signal Discovery analyzes and evaluates conversational data in contact centers to automatically classify and cluster topics based on phone calls. These learnings can be shared across departments, providing insights into marketing campaigns and enable predictive routing and streamlining for future calls.

At this week’s Invoca Summit in Santa Barbara, California, Gregg Johnson, CEO with Invoca, outlined the opportunity for providing an “unprecedented level of customers insights from phone conversations.” Using unsupervised machine learning, Invoca touts that Signal Discovery can improve marketing ROI, break down organizational silos and add value to the customer lifetime journey.

While the platform is currently in limited beta, University Hospitals has been using the technology to improve patient experiences. Noah Brooks, manager of digital engagement and analytics with University Hospitals, has been using the conversational analytics tool to solve problems including smarter routing options, adding self-service options to its IVR, and creating a more unified, consistent patient experience. All told, the Signal platform boosted conversion rates by 68% with scheduling improvements and deflected 13% of calls based on more-informed predictions of what patients were actually calling about.

At a breakout session at the event, Victor Borda and Mike McCourt, both with the Data Science team at Invoca, dug into the technology details of Signal Discovery. Delving into how the platform uses unsupervised learning to discover “unknown unknowns” (taking a page from Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote), Borda and McCourt broke down how probability distribution models and the Bayes’ theorem enable Signal Discovery to not only construct sophisticated models automatically but how the AI software actually makes AI software.

Moving beyond the geeky-in-a-good-way discussion, one question from the audience was “So what do marketers need to do?” The answer: “Just press a button and it goes.” This ability to easily gain insights from customer conversations certainly drives down the barrier to entry and empowers marketers in leading discussions to democratize conversational data.

We at Opus Research also see this technology as a gateway to intelligence assistance and Conversational Commerce, using elements of AI to support new categories of solutions for forward-looking brands and businesses.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles