Blog Post

Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber on Natural Language Processing, speech recognition and how to overcome the issue of bias in this technology

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a specific type of AI technology that allows computers to comprehend text and speech, similarly to how a human would.

The practical implications and benefits of this technology are significant to business success. Now, computers are able to process, analyse and understand a wealth of information, not just from written text sources like libraries or the internet, but also from spoken conversations such as business meetings. With this, for example, organisations can have meetings automatically transcribed, saving a huge amount of time and money.

Some examples of how the application of NLP – specifically in – can help a business succeed are through:Looking specifically at speech-to-text and analysis, there is a number of applications where this type of technology can support businesses.

NLP can analyse the sentiment in customer conversations in real-time, alerting managers to potential conflicts requiring assistance, or suggesting to the operator a different script to follow. It can also gather the most important or impactful topics and themes raised in a meeting and turn them into meeting minutes, including action items.

With the ability to gauge employee engagement in particular projects, the technology can either support staff who are less engaged or offer enablement to those most engaged.

Finally, by determining customer interest levels in different brands, products or services during conversations, businesses can gain market insight through the analysis of speech. Despite these significant benefits, one key issue with this technology is bias. To learn more, we spoke to Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber who shared his insight.

Why are there issues of bias in NLP and speech recognition? How does it occur?

Modern NLP models are trained on large datasets, so ultimately most bias comes from any bias inherent in the dataset. With the USA being the most significant economy, and the place where many recent NLP technologies have been birthed, historically, there have been significantly more language resources for US English than any other language or dialect. This has meant that most speech and language technologies, to this day, still provide the best accuracy and richest features for US English users. Another bias factor that may be present in data is historical bias, in which older training datasets may reflect outdated society stereotypes or biases.

In recent years, the bias from training data has been addressed through two main approaches:

1. Collecting and improving the availability of more varied and up to date language datasets. An example of this is the Common Voice project by Mozilla.
2. Focusing research on methods that improve performance for low resource languages, such as so-called self-supervised learning to pre-train NLP models that can be used for a range of end tasks without needing large annotated datasets. This makes it easier to learn models for less common languages where there aren’t many available large annotated datasets. One example is XLM-R.

These approaches can be used to address not just language diversity, but also to reduce bias against any under-represented population.

How does bias manifest itself in speech recognition software? What are the implications?

Bias can occur in speech recognition and NLP within a business in multiple ways, due to natural variations in speech and language usage that arise from factors such as personality, occupation, education, age, gender, etc.

Fundamentally, the most glaring bias issue in current systems is when speech-to-text recognition software simply misunderstands the speaker, and the incorrect words are noted down – or missed completely. For all intents and purposes, if we are trying to do processing and analysis of the spoken word, this speaker has no voice.

There are many reasons that misunderstanding of a speaker can occur:

• If the is multi-language and the business lacks the same breadth of languages in speech recognition systems and NLP models. With 7000+ languages across the globe, to be equitable to all employees, clients, partners, and customers, a business must ensure their NLP solutions provide equitable coverage of all languages spoken within and across the bounds of their organisation.
• Regionally, there are different dialects and accents that are unique, from US to UK English, Spanish as a second language speakers, African-American Vernacular English, and even differences between states in Australia. The models used must accommodate for all these to accurately understand what was said by all speakers.
• Different gendered speakers, and also children and elderly speakers may also sound different, so models must include these.
• Speakers with speech impairments can be misunderstood, so models must be trained to accommodate these people.

What is needed to overcome and regulate bias in NLP technology?

For NLP technology providers, there is a need to improve the diversity in underlying training data, as well as increase research into methods to improve performance for low resource scenarios, such as under-represented languages, dialects, ages or genders.

Businesses that are clients of NLP technology can influence this by insisting performance reporting is done across a range of these demographic factors and by selecting NLP technology vendors based on their accuracy across the board.

To reduce bias for their employees and customers, businesses should implement continual monitoring of NLP accuracy to ensure they are always using the best set of NLP technologies to suit their circumstances. This is not just a one-time decision – continual monitoring is required.  For instance, the software can be used to alert on circumstances where a particular speaker is not making sense in the speech-to-text – a bias is occurring. By evaluating the speaker carefully, they can then seek to implement new models to accommodate them – and other people like them.  A simple way this is often achieved in speech recognition is for employees to read a script during onboarding so that the technology can better learn their individual voices.

Another recent approach to effectively addressing bias is through NLP systems that incorporate active learning loops. This active learning approach allows companies, teams or individual users to provide positive or negative feedback on NLP outputs that allow the models to then adaptively improve for their specific usage over time. This can mean each individual can control and improve the accuracy of systems for their own usage, giving them the power to eliminate negative bias.

By building in activities and automation that help remove bias in NLP systems, businesses can ensure they are engaging ethically with all speakers, allowing everyone to be truly heard. Sharing voice data sets publicly, stripped of proprietary information, can also help evolve language models to be more inclusive.

This article originally appeared in AI Magazine.

You’ve invested in Microsoft Teams. As a clear Leader in Gartner’s UCaaS Magic Quadrant, your organisation is poised for communications success, and the platform is evolving, meeting your needs and expectations.

But now the search for a recording and conversational intelligence solution that plugs into MS Teams is taking you on a deep-dive into solutions trying to find the right one. Some are just for meetings. Some just do transcription. Most of them come with serious data security concerns.

Here are 14 reasons why the only business-ready choice for Conversational Intelligence and recording on MS Teams is Dubber.

1. Advanced data sovereignty and security

Our solution is secure by design, directly built to conform to global compliance requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, with best-in-class AES 256 bit encryption, data sovereignty and more.

Download our eBook, How to Ensure compliance on Microsoft Teams for more information, or take a look at our case study; Baseplan ensures compliant comms on Microsoft Teams with Dubber.

2. Total control

Your conversations and their data are yours to configure, replay, organise, and action as you wish. These are accessible by you only – not us.

3. Asynchronous scale, just like MS Teams

Just like MS Teams storage, tenancies, and regional requirements scale without tricky configuration; so too does Dubber.

4. Record with certainly

Dubber is always on, always working on all your required conversations. No more “Sorry, I’m having technical difficulties,” embarrassments and time wasters.

5. Enforceable recordings

Dubber recordings meet legislative requirements for data storage and capture, setting both your CIO and lawyers at ease.

6. Purpose built for UC capture

We’ve purpose-built Dubber so it integrates seamlessly with Unified Communications platforms like MS Teams. No fiddling around with trying to make apps talk to each other.

7. Native and dynamic

Dubber is a live platform. End-users are able to interact with conversational data as it is happening throughout each conversation, plus set triggers and alerts, or peruse historical data and notes.

8. Deploy with a click in minutes

There’s no need for systems admins to walk through complex setups to gain conversational intelligence on Microsoft Teams. Deploy Dubber with a click.

9. Continuous innovation

We follow the rapid release cycle model set by industry leaders such as Microsoft. That means we’re bringing new features to our platform constantly – keep up to speed via our blog and socials.

10. No limit storage

Keep all your records for as long as you like. There’s no limits on storage size or time kept, with Dubber, thanks to the power of cloud.

11. Simple and easy management

Administrators gain significant time back with a solution that doesn’t require constant management. Simply onboard team members to the platform via Azure AD, Microsoft’s identity management service that powers Teams.

12. Real-time search

Search entire organisational conversation banks like you would do Google. Find conversations that match names, topics, dates, and keywords.

13. Advanced AI-powered intelligence

This is where our platform shines, with advanced sentiment and tone analysis, the ability to instantly and automatically trigger workflows and alerts – as conversations happen, and more.

Download our AI litepaper, Unlock intelligence from every conversation with Dubber AI for more details.

14. No hidden costs

Our pricing models are set. There’s no uncertainty when it comes to billing, like when you go over a certain storage limit on some providers.

No other solution on the market ticks all the boxes we do. Chat to us about making the most of MS Teams with Dubber on the conversation.

Nearly every Service Provider strategy starts with one or all three.

Service Providers are under pressure. In an environment where sources of value are ever-decreasing and product offering differentiators are slim, increasing revenues is a challenge. 2021, McKinsey suggests, was a ​​critical year for operators: a unique opportunity to fundamentally reimagine their business or, alternatively, risk another decade of decline.

Reimagining the business of operating communications services starts with moving beyond just creating connections to realizing value from the content flowing on the network. Central to achieving this outcome is Unified Conversational Recording (UCR) – through which every conversation is captured for replay, converted to data, and enriched with AI for insights and intelligence.

Demand for conversational recording is unprecedented with Gartner indicating that by 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed, enabling the discovery of added organizational value or risk. This is a substantial market opportunity for service providers who already provide the network infrastructure for these conversations.

Embedding conversational recording and intelligence that adds value to existing customers at minimal cost and low configuration complexity is the ideal way to target this trend.

A Unified Conversational Recording solution drives revenue for service providers-

• A typical network legacy call recording solution represents a significant cost – in the millions of dollars to provision, manage and provide ongoing services. A UCR solution is a fraction of this cost, providing immediate yield. Cloud-native call recording services are up to 10X more cost-effective on a per user per month basis. UCR lives in the network and is delivered just as any service would be by the service provider.
• By switching a UCR solution on for every end-point, service providers create an immediately addressable market to sell richer solutions addressing continually rising customer needs.
• UCR solutions allow service providers to enjoy the benefits of SaaS ARR, with pricing models built in line with modern subscription market trends.

What is UCR in a S&SP Network?

UCR is:

• Native to the service provider network: to remove legacy recording costs, and allowing UCR to be delivered as a service
• Cloud-first: for simple deployment, management and provisioning
• On every endpoint: creating immediate differentiation and an addressable market for fully featured solutions
• SaaS ARR: creating a new recurring revenue stream
• True AI: for the ability to unlock conversational insights and solutions revenue

Foundation Partners Benefit More

The Dubber Foundation Partner program was designed to provide service providers with deep marketing, sales and success support – accelerating the conversion of basic Dubber call recording services to richer solutions.

• 100% attach at day one drives differentiation and immediate access to upsell opportunity
• Dubber assisted upsell to SaaS plans – increasing ARPU, in many cases doubling the ARR per customer
• Add & unify other services – further increasing ARPU through cross-sell and access to other communications services used by the customer
• Unlock the potential of conversational data to increase revenue and retention

Expensive, outdated legacy call recording’s days are numbered. And, as a communications providing service, you can capitalise on a new market that’s emerged from an overhaul in antiquated infrastructure.

Up until now, organisations have required significant investment into managed, onsite call recording equipment.

The costs multiply due to dedicated storage and processing hardware, complex high maintenance software, and ongoing service and support. And this service only captures just one line or endpoint – with multiple lines or endpoints needing recording, the process (and costs) starts again.

Unified Call Recording in the Cloud

“Unified call recording solutions offer service providers one area where they can really add value. By uniting voice data from an organisation’s potentially disparate systems, a service provider can ensure that an end customer organisation can leverage maximum value from its data and drive enhancements and optimisation.” – Cavell Group

Unified Call Recording in the Cloud replaces legacy call recording with simple to manage, easy to deploy, cloud-based and on-network infrastructure.

UCR is native to the network and requires zero hardware, complex software or heavy ongoing service and support costs. It’s a modern solution for a modern business communications landscape; across mobile, unified communications platforms, chat, and video – and it satisfies legislative compliance and data security requirements.

UCR is the key to unlocking new revenue and retention opportunities in call recording – and product offering differentiation – and enables you to create and add value to every conversation on your network.

Costs tend towards spare change

Now, the cost of voice-supplementary services is tending towards spare change.

In legacy call recording models, the costs associated with extra data services were also prohibitive; including services like manual transcription, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, and other auditing capabilities.

Only the largest enterprises were able to invest to leverage the true power of customer voice data. Now, with cloud-based services that leverage AI radically reducing direct and indirect management and configuration costs, everyone can enjoy call recording, automatic transcription, and conversational data intelligence. Every conversation can be captured and transformed with AI.

Service providers to embrace new services

Service providers who embrace cloud-based UCR voice-supplementary services can now offer these benefits to businesses across all sizes and verticals.

Service providers who adopt intelligent data visibility and usage platforms can increase their revenue and margin generation while increasing their customer’s dependency on their services. With a need to differentiate in a competitive market, it’s by productising and partnering in new connectivity data and content verticals that service providers will set themselves apart.

Source: Cavell Group

Are you really listening to your customers? Because if you aren’t capturing and unifying the conversations you have with them, meaningful insights are lost.

Sales are a multi-touchpoint experience – voice, video and chat – even more so in this new world. So, how do sales managers uncover hidden revenue?

With total visibility across multiple communication points, a centralised platform, and a little help from AI.

Traditional solutions where the recording is attached to an app or a single connection point limits visibility, introduces complexity and increases cost – inevitably you end up paying for multiple conversational recording solutions.

According to Gartner’s top strategic IT predictions for 2021 and beyond, by 2025 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analysed. Many of our clients are in tune with these predictions.

Get acquainted with Dubber’s Six ways to improve your sales with Voice Intelligence for a more in-depth look at how you and your team can establish a whole system of continual sales revenue. Dubber’s UCR and AI conversational intelligence supports compliance regulations whilst assisting businesses in enhancing their sales revenue by unlocking insights in calls, video and messages.

Tone and sentiment analysis for opportunities and performance

Having the tone and sentiment analysed from your customers is fundamental in distinguishing who is:

• A prospective customer
• A customer that could be upsold
• An undecided customer
• Not interested

Identifying positive or negative interactions or prospective customers from the sentiment analysis lets you customise your sales pitch to meet specific needs to boost sales.

Tone analysis is a distinct advantage to your sales growth. It helps sales reps execute a consistent and compliant delivery – boosting satisfaction and customer experience, which increases the chances of consumers making another purchase by 89% *.

Forecast and generate more reports

Dubber’s contact centre intelligence looks at all the call activities with powerful analytics- ensuring sales managers can see key metrics at a glance. The dashboard provides a high-level snapshot of call metrics and data analytic solutions for managers to monitor agent performance. These insights include:

• Automate the agent QA process through score sheets
• Train sales and customer teams to implement better solutions
• Set-up out-of-the-box or custom reports (schedulable)
• Access an in-depth activity log for all user initiated activities

Dubber’s reporting tools help improve workplace performance and proactively manage risks – enabling sales managers to learn which products need more consideration or which employees might need additional support on meeting sales targets. Attending this detail allows managers to predict forecasts and achieve better solutions based on analytical insights.

Leverage transcripts for retargeting and retention

With live transcripts from customer conversations, you can keep track of customers’ requests, interests, and expectations. Dubber’s beautiful and insightful transcriptions provide a powerful source of information that can enlighten a staff member or manager on a missed sales opportunity.

For example– a manager reads the transcript of a conversation to a customer. By identifying communication gaps, the manager can recognise the customer is left unsatisfied. Then, using notes from the transcript, they can reach out to the customer and suggest a more suitable alternative, capturing the sale after all. Critically they have an accurate record of the nuances of the conversation to coach and train. Hearsay gets replaced with “knowsay”.

A record of notes and highlights from past conversations helps managers:

• Retarget prospective customers
• Action insights from conversations
• Decrease revenue leakage with immutable proof
• Navigate a system of churn reduction
• Improve training and coaching

Improve order and service accuracy

With real-time transcripts, managers can be confident that information and customer instructions are captured accurately. Dubber’s search filter enables mishaps and miscommunication to come to light.

Disputes are likely to arise based on mistaken orders or inaccurate quotes- stay ahead of this by searching keywords, customers, or employees to find a resolution based on facts from the conversation- not hearsay.

Sales managers use this function to find revenue leakage by examining conversations and seeking ways to improve the sale. Based on these key findings, managers can implement a strategy that outlines procedures to strictly use or to avoid – saving time and retention.

Measure performance on specific keywords or phrases

Managers can set certain spoken words to trigger a notification alerting them of said words within a sales conversation. For example, these words, phrases or trends may be: “New”, “Expire”, “Plan”, “Renew” or “Cheapest.”

These words indicate a particular end of the subscription period, like a plan. So here is an opportunity that managers seek out as it gives them the chance to upsell, cross-sell, or put them on a new plan that’s promoted to reach the sales target. This also allows sales managers to foresee trends occurring and optimise the collected data to engage in a higher sales success rate.

Contribute key findings to marketing

By using Conversational Intelligence, sales managers can determine any gaps in the market and then transfer that data and insight to the marketing teams.

The symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing creates a vital role — they can influence or help shape how the product is understood:

• Positioned in the market (in relation to competitors)
• Identify who are the most common consumers
• If a product/service is resonating with the target market

These insights can help the marketing team build a more in-depth buyer persona and give future marketing strategies a more direct and consequential message.

Discovering hidden revenue opportunities from recorded conversations authorises sales managers to turn key findings into actions, successfully increasing revenue. Dubber’s features enable sales managers to drive actionable insights from the business’s two most important resources: employees and customers.

*Salesforce

The landscape for technology services is evolving, more rapidly than ever before. External environmental factors, including the COVID crisis, have accelerated the evolution of enterprise technology requirements and, in turn, transformed demand for innovative and differentiated solutions from service providers.

Communications service providers face a highly competitive market, with new digitally disruptive and emergent companies, thin-margined pricing strategies, and exponentially exploding user demand and expectations.

The need to differentiate – new roles for service providers in the enterprise connectivity market

Now, more than ever, service providers need to stand out and offer unique differentiated solutions to remain relevant. And that needs to be through a best-in-class multi-vendor, multi-solution suite of services – that provide communication and collaboration services. The UCaaS landscape is the ideal playground for the savvy enterprise-focused service provider.

It’s time we go beyond traditional operating models; to shift roles from simple Connectivity Providers to Service Enablers and Service Creators. Out to 2030, there is up to USD 700 billion in B2B value at play in these new role markets, and that’s just across 5G opportunities alone.

This new way of doing business allows service providers to think like cloud providers and productise critical, emergent communications services on their networks. And, like cloud providers, these services need to be enabled to customers with a click, and provide a self-service interface.

Could customer experience be a critical product offering win?

Qualtrics ROI of Customer Experience 2020 report showed that 94% of customers would purchase more from a company with very good customer experience (CX), as well as recommend them to others, resulting in increased revenue and reputation building. As a service provider, being able to offer enterprise customers a CX product that’s ready to go, no matter their communications infrastructure is a clear, easy win.

A principal strategy: adding embedded Conversational Intelligence as a Service to the list of products available for businesses, yes, switched on with a click. It’s customer experience, reimagined with the power of data – by Dubber.

Learn more about how new productization is key to service providers winning in a crowded market where margins are slim. Download the Cavell Group whitepaper, commissioned by Dubber, “Service provider differentiation through customer experience.”

Learn how service providers can increase revenue, retention and differentiation through customer experience. Exclusive insights from Cavell Group.

Learn more about:

• Why customer experience is a critical driver
• How Unified Conversational Recording can drive revenue, retention and differentiation
• What matters most in transforming competitiveness

Whether you’re on Webex Meetings, Calling, Unified Communications Manager Cloud, CUCM, HCS, or BroadWorks, you want to ensure your business conversations meet compliance requirements.

Read our guide to Compliant Conversational Recording for Cisco to learn about how to:

• Use Unified Conversational Recording (UCR) to meet all compliance mandates
• Reveal insights from voice recordings
• Drive down compliance costs across the organisation
• Use UCR effectively on Cisco

Download our guide to Compliant Conversational Recording on Cisco to find out how to meet compliance imperatives across all your Cisco communications services, with our affordable, easy to manage, and cloud-based solution.

Are your Zoom conversations compliant?

Don’t get lost in the midst of manually trawling through your team’s conversations making sure they’re adhering to compliance regulations – keep a scalable system of record with Dubber.

With today’s compliance challenges, can you really afford to turn a blind eye to the risks of non-compliance in your business?
Read our guide on a more in-depth look into how we’re prioritising surveillance with Zoom conversations:

• Solving compliance problems with Unified Conversational Recording (UCR)
• Why small and large businesses are recording their Zoom conversations
• Legacy Call Recording Vs Unified Conversational Recording
• 15 Conversational Recording imperatives

Download the guide now to help your business enhance sales performances, drive operational efficiency, improve customer service, and help reduce costs significantly- all compliantly.

Data is what runs an enterprise. If you don’t believe it, just take a look at your business financials. But we’ve come a long way from just analysing revenue and spend. There’s now the opportunity – and business imperative – to look at all business data. And what greater goldmine of information than the conversations within your business, with your partners, with your customers, and with the public?

“Data Masters enjoy 22% higher profitability, 70% higher revenue per employee, and 245% higher fixed asset turnover over their peers”
– Data Mastery, Capgemini.

Turning conversations into meaningful business data is the first hurdle. Leveraging that data is the next. Here are the common challenges faced by enterprises in harnessing the power of conversational data sets.

Challenge: Legacy technologies have fragmented datasets 

“80% of data producers and consumers regularly have data quality issues.”
– The State of Data Quality in 2021, Datafold.

Data is locked in legacy systems and often incomplete

Organisations have been using legacy, on-site and even manual technologies to record, store, transcribe and annotate voice conversations. With these solutions, archives may be limited and the data itself limited (e.g. only sound files stored, manual and incomplete data tags).

Data is usually fragmented across multiple channels/systems

Legacy systems generally only capture one channel at a time, which is no longer useful when considering that we now operate across call centres, Zoom, mobile, and more. There may be a number of different systems across different channels, each with its own data, views, and storage formats. This siloed effect means conversational data is fragmented.

Solution: Unified Conversational Recording technology

Bringing together conversational data in a centralised location across all the different channels is imperative – where it can live as one standard dataset. While some channels may lack particular data points (e.g. voice calls won’t have a video recording), the data across channels and services will be standardised. This data needs to be instantly portable so that it can be used in other business applications.

Challenge: Lots of data is required for AI to be accurate (maybe more than you have)

“There is a difficulty of obtaining data sets that are sufficiently large and comprehensive to be used for training.”
– Driving impact at scale from automation and AI, McKinsey

Industry-specific (e.g. Financial Services regulation) or domain-specific (e.g. Sales) context and dialects

Industry, domain and company-specific context and dialects aren’t always understood immediately by AI – it needs the right metadata, direction and training. For example, in Australia’s new internal dispute resolution regulatory guide for financial services businesses – ‘RG 271’ – the directive is that these businesses need to acknowledge complaints and respond within given timeframes. But what does a complaint necessarily look like in a conversation? Is it the word ‘complaint’, an angry tone of voice, or a specific utterance? Are there cultural conversational identifiers that indicate a complaint?

Solution: Capture everything, using NLP to learn your business language

Using NLP to do a deep dive into your conversational data is the only way to be able to address these type of specific business needs. Being able to acutely examine tone, sentiment, and regional differences is the key to actually understanding your employees and customer base. Without conversational metadata and NLP in circumstances like this, you’ll be left in the dark. Once you have all the right data, AI can do its job properly.

Challenge: Leveraging the cloud to reduce time to value

“The hybrid cloud platform can deliver value to the business by enabling digital transformation, giving it the best from the public cloud and on-premises infrastructure services, and transcending the corporate boundary.”
– The Business Benefits of a Hybrid Cloud Platform, DXC.technology

Some large organisations are still in the early stages of their cloud strategy implementation, and may still be working out or piloting solutions to find the best-fit and economics for their hybrid model. This complexity and legacy infrastructure limits the pace at which the organisation can change.

Solution: Look to cloud-native solutions that can integrate with legacy infrastructure

No matter where you are in your cloud maturity across the enterprise, what you can do is ensure new enterprise solutions like Conversational Intelligence are themselves cloud-native by design with the ability to integrate with your existing legacy solutions. While other cloud migration activities may take time, you can benefit from new cloud-native solutions immediately.

Challenge: Innovating with the data  

“Accompanying any technological shift is a change in tools, processes, and equally as important, people and behaviour. Even with the most cutting-edge technology and well-documented processes, users need to feel empowered to adopt modern BI solutions, as they are the ones who will drive insight-driven decision making.”
– Modern Business Intelligence, Deloitte.

Many enterprises are still focused on creating data assets – which is great, but doesn’t create value in and of itself

Yes, getting quality, complete, clean datasets is a significant priority. But alone, this data is only useful to data workers – who need directives and business questions from leadership, departments, and individuals to make sense of the data.

Solution: Develop strategic plans for what to do with the data

Make a start building the business capabilities to leverage data

Leveraging business data is where leaders in business are streaking ahead. This equates to data workers, data-ingesting applications and strategic plans and roadmaps for analysis, reporting, and automation of business data. Learning how to use data effectively is the first step.

Ultimately, organisations want to empower every employee to be able to use data insights to drive efficiencies and answer relevant complex business questions in their work.

Equally important is changing culture and ways of working

Data and insights are historically hidden in organisations, only accessed by managers or disclosed quarterly. Data capture activities have been mysterious. By opening up the visibility of capture and useful real-time insights to a wider audience, we’re able to change the culture within the organisation to feel empowered by, and trust, business data.

This trust component also underpins technology program rollouts. Workflows and automations built on business data need to be used to have effect. When leadership falters on directives and messaging, employees default to known processes. While hesitancy in revolutionary technology is natural, the business benefits you’ll gain can’t be disrupted by a 2010 mindset.

Are enterprises today ready to harness the power of conversational data sets?

Technology-forward businesses have made great strides in leveraging conversational data sets, but for the rest, there is still foundational work to be done. Picking the right technologies, using the right data, and – most importantly – knowing how to put that data to work is the path to success.

The use of artificial intelligence in sales has been increasing in popularity as it facilitates customer service or sales professionals to concentrate on more important work, as machines do the ‘busy work’.

While AI promises to do much to boost sales productivity and effectiveness, most are still in the earliest stages of realising its benefits According to The AI Dossier survey 2021, 74% of businesses are still in the AI experimentation stage and only 26% of businesses focus on deploying high impact AI use cases at scale.

Here are six ways to improve your sales outcomes using a conversational intelligence service – like Dubber – to analyse and action call, chat and video conversations. And implement successful strategies to improving retention, training, and customer experience.

What is voice intelligence?

Voice intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI), in the shape of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and real-time speech recognition to analyse calls, and digital conversations.

Dubber’s voice intelligence comes in the form of a specialised Unified Conversational Recording platform. Dubber’s UCR enables organisations to be more efficient in the management of their day to day communications and learn more from customer conversations. From automating note-taking to detecting customer sentiment, conversational intelligence is ending not knowing in businesses of every kind.

1. Don’t miss a conversation

As we say at Dubber: record, replay and reveal.

Having a solid foundation for Unified Conversational Recording (UCR) is essential for capturing, storing, and centralising your customer sales interactions.

Recording every voice, video, text, and chat across any communication device and end-point is where your sales will see an improvement. This enables you to catch sales conversations and turn them into actionable insights – seeing where you can drive an increase in revenue and retention.

Conversational Intelligence and UCR are two quintessential pieces in capturing recordings. These conversations are where 80% of the most crucial conversations with customers and employees occur.

2. Get the full picture with intelligent transcription and search

By complimenting Dubber’s advanced AI and natural language processing with multi-vendor AI technologies – live transcriptions can help seal the deal in your team’s sales conversations.

Here’s how the sales team and managers use Dubber’s live transcriptions:

• Always have context as to the previous conversation
• Understand the customer — know their requests, interests or boundaries
• Verify orders and T&Cs — key to effectively resolving future issues and disputes
• Note important details — stay focused and save time with the notes automagically connected to your CRM platform
• Use transcriptions to coach and train staff
• Monitor advice provided in line with compliance regulations

Take advantage of our advanced features to automatically detect the dominant language spoken.

Let’s say: A customer mentions she previously spoke to an employee about a different plan but can’t remember which plan it was. Easily search transcripts to find precisely which plan your employee suggested- without wasting any time.

3. Learn more about customer and employee sentiments

Sometimes we can have a hard time reading people’s emotions- especially when you’re not face-to-face.

With Dubber’s AI sentiment insight, you can now know what your team and customers are saying, feeling and needing. This is a distinct advantage to the growth of your sales as the tone analysis helps sales reps provide a consistent and compliant delivery. Boosting satisfaction and customer experience increases the chances of consumers making another purchase by 89%.

Dubber AI sentiment analytics combined with machine learning and NLP to save you time conducting employee call evaluations.

It analyses the spoken words in conversations by:

• Categorising them as positive, neutral, or negative
• Labelling calls against seven emotions
• Identifying the dominant language spoken

Let’s say: You have a new employee and they are trying to push a sale but are coming across as abrasive to the customer. The customer is frustrated and angry but you can use this information to help the sales rep work on their communication skills.

4. Search, filter and find across all conversations in real-time

Frantically searching for that customer interaction transcript from a week ago? Look no further than quick, elastic and instant search within Dubber.

Save stress and time with instant search results from real-time recordings by team members or customers. Dubber extracts information and insights from the conversation and categorises and organises the context.

You can apply the filter on the search function to specify:

• Team member
• Day/Time
• Keywords
• Tags
• Phone number

Show that you’re attentive to detail. Utilise quick cross-referencing on the go, verify accounts, or see what type of service, plan or products the customer is currently using. You’ll avoid chasing tails and save the customer from having the same conversation.

Let’s say: David is the best sales rep in your team. When training a new employee, you can filter and search all, or some of David’s calls for training and coaching purposes.

5. Get notified and stay on top of monitoring conversations

Sometimes we can find mistakes or red flags a little too late with legacy call recording, resulting in a loss.

Rest assured with Dubber’s real-time alerts and notifications you’ll stay ahead and be ready to diffuse situations when specific words and phrases are triggered.

You’ll be able to:

• Create notifications from a negative sentiment
• Alert on critical sales terms e.g “Not interested”
• Alert immediately or at the end-of-day summary

Utilise these options to get a leg up on your competitors – create an immutable record of best interests efforts by gaining insight from prospective customers and what your opponents may be offering. As well as trends emerging, or if a sales script just isn’t resonating with customers- you’ll know.

Let’s say: You’ve set an alert every time a customer says “not comfortable” and identify that many of the instances refer to when a customer says “not comfortable with sharing those details over the phone”. You can work out that this might be a common concern and highlight PCI compliance and security measures in marketing messaging.

6. Offer safe and easy payment options  

People are more aware and definitely more sceptical of giving out personal information these days. As your sales conversations travel into confidential territory, you could be at risk of losing revenue if customers are reluctant to give out sensitive information via phone or video.

But here’s where you get the upper hand — Dubber’s PCI DSS solutions have enabled billions of dollars over phone payments globally. All data is encrypted and stored within the produced region, guaranteeing data compliance.

Encourage your team to communicate to the clients that:

Dubber’s Voice intelligence assures you that the PCI solutions hosts secure payment platforms that intercept any card data from entering your contact centre environment – basically bulletproof!

Let’s say: You’re speaking to a customer and they wish to pay a bill over the phone using a credit or debit card. Rather than asking them to read aloud their details, they type in their payment card details using their telephone keypad with a PCI compliant voice intelligence solution.

Improve sales while ensuring internal company policy compliance

With Gartner estimating that remote workers will represent 32% of all employees worldwide by the end of 2021, keeping conversations compliant can be very hard to oversee. But with Dubber, you have effortless yet total visibility of all your team’s conversations all in one place.

Managers use voice intelligence to ensure the team adheres to internal policies and collects data from customer insights that can be used to their advantage. This will drive team and sales performance to new lengths. Managers use voice intelligence as a tool:

• Save time monitoring and reviewing calls
• Enable teams to meet sales targets
• Manage and store conversations from teams

Let’s say: Your manager is reviewing your conversation with a customer and they identify a missed opportunity for you to make a sale. They playback said instance to you and utilise for coaching.

One of the most exciting and significant advancements of AI in sales is the development of voice intelligence. As you can see, voice intelligence and UCR software offer teams, managers, and organisations the upper hand. Hopefully, you’ll get some good ideas from this and pick up on some critical features of Dubber’s voice intelligence and apply them to your business.

Look forward to knowing your customers and expediting sales!

How unified call recording and voice AI can help you comply with certainty

From October 5 new regulations will cover how financial service companies handle complaints.
Regulatory Guide 271 lays out what companies need to do. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is in charge of the reforms. It’s guide is an updated set of obligations for internal dispute resolution (IDR) and replaces the existing RG 165.
In this paper we’ll further explore what the regulations mean for financial services firms and how new unified call recording and voice AI technologies can help you comply quickly and cost-effectively.