People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many openly despise them. In a recent Gartner survey, 64% of consumers said they prefer companies not to use any type of AI, including chatbots, in customer service. 53% even said that if a company were to consider replacing human agents with AI, they would consider switching to a rival.
Alex Levin, a former product manager at Thomson Reuters and former senior vice president of growth at Handy, believes most people dislike chatbots because they've had bad experiences with them in the past.
“Contact center teams are often given only cost-cutting targets, forcing them to move to low-quality deflections and badly deterministic bots,” he told TechCrunch. “At Handy, we were always frustrated with traditional contact center software, most of which was written before the cloud existed and required a large number of developers and IT administrators to maintain.”
Levin felt that with the right combination of technologies, chatbots can provide engaging experiences. So he teamed up with Rebecca Green, whom he met at Handy, where he was chief product officer, to launch Regal, which builds AI-powered contact center solutions.
“As operators, we wanted to move quickly, make quick changes, conduct A/B testing, and run our contact centers the same way our colleagues do with marketing and product.” says Levin.
Image credit: Regal
Regal offers phone and text-based chatbots that can respond to common customer service requests. Chatbots can handle things like interruptions without interrupting the flow of the conversation, and can adjust their language depending on the customer's emotions (such as apologizing if the customer is upset).
Brands can make chats more engaging by customizing the language used by Regal's chatbot, setting guardrails, and having the chatbot capture data such as customer birthdays, names, and conversation history. You can.
Regal's chatbot can also perform certain actions. It functions as an “AI agent” so to speak. For example, a chatbot can send a follow-up via text or email, schedule a call for next steps, or transfer the conversation to a human agent if it needs to be escalated.
The market for call center AI bots is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2032, so it's not at all surprising that Legal has a lot of competition. Got It AI is developing a “fully autonomous” contact center. Cognigy provides a platform for building call center workflow automation. OpenAI Chairman Brett Taylor's Sierra focuses on chatbots for customer service functions.
Still, Levin said he's satisfied with Regal's growth so far.
“Millions of people around the world engage with their favorite brands like Google, Kin, Toyota, AAA, Ro and more every month through Regal,” he said. “We believe that 10 years from now, most contact center interactions will be autonomous, so we're all on board.”
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 Regal's total funding to $83 million, which will be used for product development and growth of Regal's 100-person team based in New York.