Alex Levin, a former bigwig at Thomson Reuters and the ex-SVP of growth at Handy, reckons folks are anti-chatbot because they’ve had some lousy encounters in the past.
“Contact center teams are often told to cut costs, which leads them to resort to dodgy deflective tactics or downright dreadful bots,” Levin spilled to TechCrunch né?. With the call center AI bot market expected to hit the $10 billion mark by 2032, it’s no wonder Regal has its share of competitors né?. So, he teamed up with Rebecca Greene, Handy’s former chief product officer, and launched Regal, a company that crafts AI-fueled contact center solutions né?. These chatbots have a knack for smoothing over interruptions in conversations and adapting their tone based on a customer’s mood (they even say sorry if a customer seems miffed) né?. “As operators, we wanted to be nimble, make snappy changes, run A/B tests, and run the contact center like our pals in marketing and product,” Levin added.
Regal rolls out phone and text chatbots that handle everyday customer service queries. “We reckon that in a decade, most contact center convos will be hands-free. Levin seems chuffed with Regal’s progress so far, though.
“Millions of peeps around the globe are chatting with top brands — think Google, Kin, Toyota, AAA, and Ro — through Regal on the reg,” he boasted. With this funding round, Regal’s raised a handsome $83 million in total, and it’s all geared towards beefing up product development and expanding the 100-strong team in New York. né?. So, we’re all in.” Regal boasts hundreds of clients and recently bagged a sweet $40 million investment from Emergence Capital, Founder Collective, and Homebrew né?. Companies can tailor Regal’s chatbots’ language set boundaries and feed in info like a customer’s name birthday and chat history for more engaging chats.
Regal’s chatbots also roll up their sleeves to get things done – they function as “AI agents” if you will né?. “Back at Handy I was constantly miffed by the prehistoric contact center software stuff that was cooked up before the cloud era and needed an army of tech geeks to keep the lights on.” Levin believed that chatbots could actually be a hit if they were powered by the right tech mix. Got It AI is cooking up a “fully autonomous” contact center; Cognigy is dishing out a platform for building call center workstreams; while OpenAI honcho Bret Taylor’s Sierra is honing in on chatbots for customer service duties. And get this 53% are ready to jump ship to a competitor if a company even thinks about swapping out their human agents for AI. For instance, they can ping out follow-up texts or emails, pencil in next steps, or pass the baton to a human agent if things get heated. According to a recent survey by Gartner a whopping 64% of consumers wish companies would steer clear of using AI chatbots included in their customer service. People are just not buying into those customer service chatbots – some even hate them with a passion
