Curious about AI-powered phone calls? You’re not the only one.
Around 80% of customer service and support organizations were predicted to use AI to improve customer experiences this year. And considering the cost may drop 10x every year, it’s more accessible to small businesses than you’d think.
If you’re looking to modernize your business and stay ahead of the competition, this article outlines five key steps for using AI to analyze phone calls. And if you still need to get buy-in from your team, we’ll highlight several important reasons why AI call analysis is crucial for growing brands (plus the best tools to get started).
Step-by-step guide to using AI to analyze phone calls
Ready to level the playing field with larger companies?
Here’s the step-by-step process to turn phone conversations into valuable customer insights.
Step 1: Get a phone system that supports AI call analysis
While you could use standalone call recording AI tools like Otter or Rev AI, this will add extra work to your already full plate. You’d need to upload call recordings into the app, which becomes less scalable as your business’s call volume grows.
What about automating the upload with tools like Zapier? While this could save some time, it would require adding yet another app to your expanding tech stack. Plus, if something goes wrong, manual troubleshooting could eat up your time.
A more efficient approach is to invest in a VoIP phone system like Quo, which automatically records calls, organizes them in a conversation inbox, and analyzes voice call sentiment with AI. No need to switch between multiple tools or configure APIs — just press record (or set it to auto-record), and you’re good to go.
Which brings us to the next point:
Step 2: Switch on call recordings and transcriptions
There are two ways to record phone calls for your business: on-demand and automatically.
On-demand call recording is what it sounds like: tapping a button on your phone, computer, or tablet to capture specific parts of a call. Automatic call recording removes the manual effort, automatically recording entire phone calls from pickup to hang-up.
Automatic call recording is ideal — you don’t have to worry about remembering to press record. If you’re using a VoIP system like Quo, you can turn on auto-record on the Business or Scale plans.
The next step is enabling AI-powered call summaries and transcripts to create searchable records for future reference. In Quo, our AI model transcribes audio, extracts key insights, and summarizes action items to help you prioritize next steps.
No more missed details or manual note-taking. You can stay fully present during calls and avoid the hassle of relistening later.
💡Related: How to legally record phone calls
Step 3: Organize conversations with smart call tagging
Using Quo, you can utilize AI communication tools like call tags to automatically categorize calls based on predefined criteria for customer sentiment, keywords, or business topics. This makes it easy to prioritize specific calls or get actionable insights that create a better experience for your customers.
For example, you could add AI tags like:
- Dissatisfied customer: Call tags use customer sentiment analysis technology to flag negative conversations whenever callers voice frustration or complain.
- Billing issue: You can tag calls mentioning payments, invoices, or other account charges so you can identify unresolved problems or escalate issues if necessary.
- Escalation needed: You could add tags for calls that mention requests to speak with a manager or supervisor (or if the rep refers a customer to another team or department).
If you use Quo’s AI agent, Sona, to handle calls that would otherwise go to voicemail, you can use call tags to spot trends — helping you train Sona to respond more effectively over time.
Step 4: Take action based on smart insights
Once you’ve set up AI call tags in Quo (available on the Scale plan), you can quickly filter and find important calls using call views. This dashboard lets you filter calls by tag, teammate, or date, helping you identify objections, feature requests, and call drivers at a glance.
Let’s say you see surges in tags for billing issues. That could mean your checkout process needs clarification. Spotting frequent customer frustration tags? You may need to refine support scripts or your FAQs.
You can also use call data to keep an eye on metrics like response time, resolution rate, and call volume. By opening call views and filtering by rep, you can review their most common call tags and summary items to find coachable customer service moments or celebrate wins.
Step 5: Automate follow-ups and optimize workflows
Apart from simply analyzing calls, you can use AI tools to make post-call work easier.
For example, you can:
- Use integrations to auto-log transcripts and call details in your CRM. This is a great way to help sales and support teams stay aligned and create a single source of truth for everyone to reference.
- Create AI-generated follow-up messages. You can use our text message response generator when sending a resource, scheduling a callback, or offering a special deal.
- Delegate next steps by tagging coworkers in recordings or transcripts. That way, everyone on your team knows who’s following up on what, so you don’t accidentally double up on tasks.
6 best tools for AI call analysis
While you can always listen back on calls manually, AI-driven tools help you analyze data and spot trends at scale. Here are a few of the best tools on the market:
1. Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Pricing: Starts at $23 per user per month
Quo is a business phone system with built-in AI features that simplify call management, improve the customer experience, and reduce manual tasks. Growing businesses can work smarter with AI-powered call summaries, transcripts, call tags, and a 24/7 AI voice agent to ensure no call goes unanswered.
Here’s what one customer said:
“Being part of the Call Tags beta program, I’ve seen firsthand how much easier it makes organizing and tracking customer interactions. The AI automatically tags calls, saving me time and letting me focus on what really matters. I can quickly find key conversations, spot trends, and keep everything organized without the hassle. It’s been a game-changer for staying on top of customer needs!” — Will Swan, Chief Executive Officer at 512 Hosting
Key AI features:
- AI call transcriptions and summaries
- Smart call tagging and call views
- AI voice agent (Sona) for missed call handling
- Contact suggestions based on conversation data
Best for: Small and growing teams that want to automate call analysis and streamline communication — without stitching together multiple tools.
2. Dialpad
Pricing: Starts at $15 per user per month
Dialpad is a cloud-based phone system built for contact centers and large teams. Managers have oversight over team performance with real-time transcriptions for video meetings, calls, and voicemails. Real-time agent assist cards and live sentiment analysis tools are valuable for coaching, but require more expensive Dialpad plans.
Key features:
- Live sentiment analysis (on the Support or Sell plans)
- Real-time agent assist (on the Support or Sell plans)
- Real-time transcripts
- Call summaries with action items
Best for: Contact centers and large teams that need advanced coaching features like live sentiment analysis and agent assist cards.
3. RingCentral
Pricing: Starts at $20 per user per month
RingCentral is a VoIP service that offers helpful features like an AI receptionist, an AI assistant, and conversation intelligence.
You can customize the AI receptionist’s personality to match your brand and use its automated SMS feature to answer specific customer inquiries. Their conversation intelligence tool picks up on trends and customer sentiment, but requires an additional subscription. RingCentral’s AI assistant transcribes your phone calls, helps write and translate text messages, and recaps team chats — but some of these features require plan upgrades.
Key features:
- AI call transcripts and summaries
- Call intelligence for coaching
- 24/7 AI receptionist
- AI-generated message responses
- AI-generated translations
Best for: Larger businesses that need advanced conversation intelligence and multilingual support.
4. Aircall
Pricing: Starts at $30 per user per month (three user minimum)
Aircall is a cloud-based VoIP system with an AI assistant that creates call summaries, identifies key topics, generates talk-to-listen ratios, and logs recordings and transcripts to your CRM. It can also flag competitor mentions in customer calls so you can map out recurring pain points. Though these AI features sound impressive, they come at an additional $9 per user — on top of an already expensive subscription.
Key features:
- Call transcriptions and summaries
- Push transcriptions to CRM or helpdesk
- Talk-to-listen ratio
- Competitor mentions
- Action items
- Trending topics
Best for: Sales and support teams that want deep call insights integrated with their CRM.
5. 8×8
Pricing: Contact sales for a quote
8×8 is a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform that combines voice, video, and messaging. 8×8’s AI features include call transcriptions, conversation summaries, sentiment analysis, and a generative chat assistant — but many of these require paid add-ons that cost extra per user. Only the AI-powered agent is included, which can automate tasks and sync data across channels using a visual workflow builder.
Key features:
- Advanced analytics
- Speech analysis for phone calls
- Enterprise APIs
- AI voice agent
- IVR (interactive voice response)
Best for: Enterprises that want advanced customization, detailed analytics, and flexible APIs.
6. CallRail
Pricing: Starts at $45 per month
CallRail is a call tracking and analytics platform for web forms and phone calls. It offers customer sentiment analysis for calls, summaries, attribution data from conversations, and trend-tracking. It’s useful for optimizing phone call campaigns if you don’t already have a VoIP phone system.
Key features:
- Local numbers and calling minutes
- Call and text tracking and attribution
- Call recording and routing
- Call transcripts and summaries
- Keyword analysis
Best for: Marketers and agencies that want to track, analyze, and optimize inbound calls without switching to a full VoIP phone system.
Why analyze phone calls using AI?
Still not convinced AI call analysis is worth it?
Here are a few more ways it benefits small businesses:
Save hours of manual work
No need to manually review call recordings or take notes. With conversation intelligence tools, you can instantly convert conversations into text and get a detailed summary of action items for after-call work or follow-up emails.
The bottom line? You’ll spend more time engaging with customers and coworkers and less time doing busy work or switching between multiple tabs.
Identify customer needs faster
Rather than guessing what your customers need, you can use sentiment analysis tools to find and address their issues. This will help customers feel heard and engaged and can reduce churn risks.
Quo’s AI tools help you spot trends and patterns in real time, like common customer complaints or team performance issues (think excessive call time or excessive call transferring). Then, you can brainstorm solutions to solve these problems, whether that’s creating additional resources or offering 1:1 training to your team.
💡Related: Customer service quality assurance: Why your business needs it
Improve team collaboration
The best AI call analysis platforms offer ways to get more work done as a team. With Quo (formerly OpenPhone), you can create shared phone numbers with team inboxes so everyone on your team can review past customer interactions — whether or not they were on the call.
You can use Quo to collaborate beyond phone calls. For example, you can set up text message templates (we call them snippets) so your team can respond quickly and consistently. You can also use tools like auto-replies and scheduled messages to set expectations while you’re away from your desk.
Related: Want to create better customer experiences? Learn the best strategies for customer interaction management.
Make data-backed decisions to improve the customer experience
AI insights help you build stronger customer relationships by quickly addressing issues and improving their phone experience. This can be as easy as looking for trends in call tags — such as an uptick in troubleshooting requests — so you can add resources to your customer support process.
This also applies to sales. Let’s say your leads have recurring objections that need extra finesse. Identifying them will help you refine call scripts for your sales team and monitor how results change over time. Done right, this should improve your sales performance and lead to better conversion rates.
Limitations of AI call analysis
AI-powered call analysis can be valuable, but choosing the wrong tool — especially without doing your research — can lead to serious issues for your business. Here are a few important limitations to keep in mind:
1. Data privacy risks
AI systems often process sensitive customer data, so it’s important to choose tools with encryption, transparent data policies, and compliance with industry standards. Otherwise, you risk data breaches or non-compliance penalties.
2. Misinterpretation of nuance and sentiment
AI can struggle to detect sarcasm, slang, or emotional tone, which can lead to misleading insights without human oversight. You should always have a human double-check AI-generated content and reports.
3. Accuracy depends on audio quality
Background noise, a poor connection, or overlapping voices can lead to poor transcription accuracy and sentiment analysis, creating less reliable results. It’s important to choose a tool with high-quality audio and reliable transcriptions to help mitigate these issues.
Quo: The only tool you need to unlock AI-powered call insights
AI call analysis once seemed like a sci-fi gimmick rather than a business essential. Even when it became a reality, many believed it would be too expensive for small businesses.
But as you’ve seen, AI call analysis is here to stay — and with a VoIP platform like Quo, it starts at just $23 per user per month.
Quo provides everything you need to analyze customer conversations more efficiently, from automatic call recording and transcripts to third-party integrations to push insights to your CRM, Slack channel, and more.
All that’s left is to take us for a spin.
Test Quo’s AI tools with your team by signing up for a seven-day free trial.
FAQs
Quo offers call transcriptions and summaries so you can instantly get context without listening to hour-long conversations. You also get a list of action items to hold everyone accountable and avoid miscommunication.
You can answer phone calls using AI voice agents, which interact and respond to human voice commands using natural language processing (NLP). For example, Quo’s Sona is an AI agent that answers calls around the clock, responding to questions based on the knowledge you provide and collecting details for you to follow up with customers later.
AI tools can help uncover common pain points in customer feedback so you can proactively solve them and boost customer satisfaction. You can also use AI to improve custotmer service efficiency — everyone on your team will spend less time sorting through calls and more time delighting customers.
AI in call analysis can misinterpret nuances like sarcasm or emotion, struggle with poor audio quality, and pose privacy risks if data isn’t properly managed. That’s why, at a minimum, it’s important to choose a tool that offers reliable transcription accuracy and protects your data.
