Call intelligence preview for sales managers is here

Talking directly with customers is an important part of any sales cycle and with the growth of inside sales call centers, sales calls are becoming even more critical to business success.  Sales managers in call centers are at the center of this motion as they need to onboard sales representatives (reps), train them, coach them regularly and keep them motivated. These managers want to understand how effective their teams’ calls are. They want to understand what is or isn’t working with customers, which products and topics are gaining momentum and which ones are losing traction. At the end, they want to have a systematic mechanism to determine best practices for sales calls and understand why some sellers are more effective than others, so that they can coach the sellers accordingly. However today, this is a manual and tedious process which is susceptible to errors.
With call intelligence, part of Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, sales managers in call centers will now get the power to process call recordings at scale and generate valuable insights from their existing assets. Rather than listening to a few sample call recordings to make assessments, they will be able to get a comprehensive overview across all calls. These insights have two-fold benefits: they enable managers to deliver smarter coaching to their sales representatives and allow them to identify trends that allow them to proactively launch new sales training.

Note:
To generate insights with call intelligence, call recordings will have to be uploaded to the organization’s instance of Azure for analysis along with a standard metadata that Microsoft provides.

Read on for a walk through of some of the call intelligence capabilities in more detail. To understand the full set of capabilities included in AI for Sales, visit our Business Applications Release Notes

Team view

This page provides the manager an overview of the team. The top level KPIs provide statistics on volume of sales calls that were processed, calls that had competitor mentions, and calls that had tracker words mentions. These words, called trackers, are specific words that the manager has identified as important to track. For example, a company offering fitness services might want to track the word ‘yoga’. As part of the onboarding of this product capability, customers will be able to provide a list of tracker words that they care about and call intelligence capability will track these words across all calls.
The next section offers insights cards. Insights cards highlight information such as top trending words across the sales calls and reps that might need coaching due to having high negative customer sentiment on their calls or are deviating a lot from the rest of the team on behavioral KPIs.
Then the call analytics are divided into 3 sections:

1. Customer sentiment: Based on transcript that is generated from the call recordings, customer sentiment is extracted for each call and aggregated to give a picture across all calls. The sentiment is visualized on a time series to see whether they are improving over time. Sentiments can also be displayed to compare sales reps to each other, helping the sales manager identify whether any individual reps are falling behind the rest of the team.

2. Content: The first visualization here portrays which tracker words are occurring frequently in sales conversations. Using this, managers can ensure that sales reps are trained on the topics and products that customers often bring up in discussions. The second visualization gives them information on which competitors and competitive products are most commonly mentioned by customers during conversations. Using this manager can guide the reps to handle competition effectively during a sales call.

3. Conversational style: These behavioral KPIs provide deep information about the conversational style of sales reps. While “talk-to-listen ratio” gives a good understanding of how regularly a rep is listening to customer, “switch rate” signals how engaging is a rep while talking to a customer.  “Pause  before speaking” can indicate how patient a sales rep is. The “longest monologue by customer” can signal whether a rep is asking good questions that enable them to understand customer needs. All these KPIs collectively can be leveraged by the manager to understand the different styles of his team members and coach them appropriately.

Note:
In this release, call data cannot be tied back to lead/opportunity records in D365 

Sales Rep view 

Once the manager notices a sales rep that potentially need coaching, he/she can move to the Sales rep view to understand that specific rep’s sales calls in more depth.

At the very top, are all the behavioral KPIs for the rep. Below these are the insights cards which provide information on where the rep stands in comparison to the rest of team. The manager can then get a peek into customer sentiment across all the calls for the rep and select a specific call to drill deeper into what resulted in negative customer sentiment. The page displays the entire transcript of that selected call and a sentiment timeline for the call. The manager can then jump to a moment in the call when the customer sentiment really went south and, by looking at transcript, recognize how the rep could handle a similar situation better in the future. Using this method, he can have targeted guidance for individual reps and coach them to become more effective during their sales calls.

Learn more and join the community 

A few next steps:

• If you are running call centers and want to boost sales via smarter coaching with AI for Sales, please reach out to us at D365callintelligence@microsoft.com to set up call intelligence for your organization
• Join our community to engage with our AI for Sales experts
• Share your ideas and suggestions to improve the product or submit feedback directly in the app by clicking on the smiley face in the navigation bar.
• Visit our documentation to get more details
• Learn more about Dynamics 365 AI for Sales