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People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many absolutely despise them. In recent Gartner reconnaissance64% of consumers said they would prefer that companies not use AI of any kind — including chatbots — in their customer service. 53% of them went so far as to say that they would consider switching to a competitor if the company considered replacing its human customers with artificial intelligence.
Alex Levin, former product manager at Thomson Reuters and former senior vice president of growth at Handy, believes that most people hate chatbots because they’ve had bad experiences in the past.
“Contact center teams are often given only cost reduction goals, forcing them to move to low-quality drift or terrible deterministic bots,” he told TechCrunch. “At Handy, I was constantly frustrated with legacy contact center software, most of which was built before the advent of the cloud and required an army of developers and IT administrators to maintain.”
However, Levine felt that chatbots could deliver compelling experiences, when supported by the right mix of technologies. So he teamed up with Rebecca Green, whom he met at Handy where she was chief product officer, to get started royalwhich builds AI-powered call center solutions.
“As operators, we wanted to move quickly, make quick changes, do A/B testing, and run the contact center the way we saw our colleagues doing in marketing and product,” Levin said.
Regal offers phone and text-based chatbots that can fulfill common customer service requests. Chatbots can handle things like interruptions without breaking the flow of the conversation, and adjust their verbiage depending on the customer’s feelings (for example, apologizing if the customer is upset).
Brands can customize the language Regal’s chatbots use, set guardrails, and have the chatbots pull data like a customer’s date of birth, name, and conversation history to make chats more engaging.
Regal’s chatbots can also take certain actions — “AI agents” if you will. For example, chatbots can send text messages or email follow-ups, schedule next step calls, and transfer to a human agent if the conversation needs to escalate.
With the expectation that a market will emerge for call center AI robots He deserves Over $10 billion by 2032, it’s not entirely surprising that Regal has a lot of competition. Got It AI is developing a “fully autonomous” contact center; Cognigy provides a platform for building contact center workflow automation; OpenAI President Brett Taylor Sierra is focusing on chatbots for customer service jobs.
Levine says he’s happy with Regal’s growth so far.
“Millions of people around the world interact with their favorite brands – like Google, Kin, Toyota, AAA and Ro – every month through Regal,” he said. “We believe that 10 years from now, most contact center interactions will be autonomous. So we’re all in.”
Regal claims to have hundreds of customers, and this month closed a $40 million investment round from Emergence Capital, Founder Collective, and Homebrew. The round brings the total amount raised by Regal to $83 million, which will be used for product development and growing Regal’s 100-person New York-based team.
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