Employee conversational analytics unlocks business insights
Employee engagement tools, compliance platforms and meeting summaries can track employee conversations for business leaders. But watch out for privacy issues.
Conversational analytics is now a primary component of an effective customer experience strategy. Nearly half of approximately 1,000 companies are using conversational analytics to gain insights from customer calls, texts and other CX engagement channels, according to Metrigy research.
Conversational analytics insights include information about the performance of products and services, customer pain points, sales opportunities and overall customer service agent performance. But customer conversations and interactions are not the only source of business intelligence.
Conversational analytics go beyond CX
Companies can also tap into internal employee conversations -- as well as interactions with sales prospects and business partners -- to gain further insights. Today, an increasing number of employee engagement platform vendors are adding conversational insight capabilities to their offerings. A couple of examples include the following:
Slack AI is a native tool for Slack that summarizes channels and threads to help business leaders gain insights into specific projects or departments, or even the organization as a whole.
Microsoft Viva Insights is integrated with Teams and Outlook. It provides personal insights and overall organizational insights. These enable employees to improve work patterns while helping managers identify potential burnout.
Compliance vendors that capture conversations across multiple channels are another potential source of conversational intelligence. Software from vendors like Global Relay can monitor communications to identify potential risks, such as the exchange of personally identifiable information or protected business information.
Nearly 70% of 307 companies are using information in their compliance platforms for business intelligence, according to a global Metrigy study.
Tracking employee engagement
Another aspect of conversation analytics is monitoring employee engagement. This enables business leaders to keep an eye on the pulse of their organization to better understand employee interaction. Tools for employee engagement monitoring include:
Workvivo, part of Zoom, provides a social engagement platform similar to Facebook and LinkedIn. Analytics include leaderboards and engagement trends, providing insights into interpersonal employee interactions.
Culture Amp uses analytics to correlate communication patterns with employee retention and engagement scores.
Meeting summaries and transcripts, generated by AI, are another source of business intelligence. These can be fed into an AI large language model to allow querying or automated reporting on topics discussed in meetings. AI tools can be queried to identify potential business pain points for remedial action.
Watch out for employee privacy issues
Employee privacy is a primary concern for organizations considering implementing employee conversational analytics. The use of such tools may be governed by privacy laws, such as the EU AI Act.
Companies using employee conversational analytics should inform employees what information is captured and how it's used for business intelligence.
At a minimum, organizations should consider anonymizing data to ensure they capture only conversational data and not attribution or other identifiable sources of data. Additionally, organizations looking to use conversational data to gauge employee performance or wellness should ensure their analysis is not biased by AI training models or data. They should ensure AI tools are not used to infer potential behavior, such as identifying employees who may be experiencing health-related challenges.
Finally, companies using employee conversational analytics should inform employees what information is captured and how it's used for business intelligence.
Employee conversational analytics offers tremendous potential to provide insights into organizational performance, including potential trouble points and employee engagement. Companies that adopt these tools must follow local operating law and consider anonymizing data to protect the privacy of individual employees.
