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Conversational value is a concept that elevates the most important facets and takeaways from conversations, whether in a business context or from a personal standpoint. Meeting quality depends on the quality of the data exchanged as well as how meaningful the interactions are between the parties involved. Meetings need to be structured and straightforward, preventing a lot of dead time and encouraging useful feedback between parties. In a business context, conversational value is a good way to measure the effectiveness and sharpen the skills of team members, using AI takeaways and identifying engagement signals to make meetings more purposeful. 

Conversational value can make businesses more action-driven while prioritizing value over price. By prioritizing and maximizing conversational value, businesses create more practical avenues to ensure a productive atmosphere at every level. 

Why Prioritizing Conversational Value Matters 

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Having unnecessary and unproductive meetings can prove very costly to businesses, affecting financial health and productivity. Around 70% of meetings lack purposefulness, with studies showing indications from managers that meetings are preventing them from doing meaningful work rather than ensuring better work gets done. According to one study by the University of North Carolina, 65% of managers indicated that meetings stopped them from doing their work while around the same percentage prevent them from deep thinking. 

The biggest reason meetings fail is that the conversations being had in these meetings lack value. As shown in recent years, unproductive meetings can cause serious financial problems, with tens of billions of dollars lost. Whether due to a lack of organization, a lack of action items, or creating meetings that could have easily been a well-worded email, lost meetings take teams away from value-added tasks and prevent businesses from optimizing their customer relationship management. 

Conversational value allows businesses to be more selective about meetings and prioritize which takeaways they get, so they only organize productive meetings with teams focusing on the most important action items. Additionally, conversational value and intelligence ensure that teams go beyond the typical professional realm with conversations, striking a more personal and engaging connection, motivating teams to collaborate better, and putting forward strong ideas.

Preparing Your Points and Identifying Your Roles

A lack of preparation dooms the purpose of a meeting before it’s held. Prioritizing conversational value allows you to understand your action items and get quickly generated AI takeaways so you can analyze the biggest points from past conversations and build on those points for the next meeting. Try to understand your fellow team members and their strengths/weaknesses so that you can build a better rapport with them. If some members of your team are introverts, encourage them to provide more considered and thoughtful feedback. If some are very opinionated, then encourage them to give their feedback in the most considerate yet constructive way possible so as not to dissuade others from participating. 

Also, have an agenda in place so that you know what the areas of concern are that must be addressed and a proper list of action items so that the meeting is as professional and organized as possible, regardless of the location. 

Additionally, it’s vital to establish roles so that everyone in the team knows what part to play in a meeting, facilitating a better exchange of information and giving everyone a chance to be heard. Conversational value doesn’t just pertain to what’s said in the meeting itself, but how you approach team members regarding their participation and ensuring everyone feels a high level of importance heading into the meeting. 

Team leaders should clarify with their team members what the purpose of the meeting is, whether it’s strictly brainstorming, a proposal, or a critique. By informing team members of the purpose and the contributions they’re expected to make, more conversational value can be extracted from the meeting because every role is clear, and, once played effectively, better ideas can be shared. 

Taking Effective Notes Makes a Big Difference 

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Adding conversational value to your meetings and conversations doesn’t stop when the meeting ends. 

Taking useful notes ensures you have a definitive record of all the finer points discussed in the meeting and use them as a basis for improving the quality of future gatherings. By implementing conversational intelligence in your business model, you can extract better takeaways and get tips on how to improve your conversation quality. You can review long meetings in a matter of minutes through automation and get real-time feedback on engagement thanks to AI note-taking and follow-up.

Additionally, with automation, you can select custom topic trackers and see questions paired with data insights so you develop a better idea of the pertinent things you should be asking during every meeting. 

Versational provides a conversational assistant solution to ensure you reap the improved business value from boosting your conversational value. Try our product for free today.