Regal Raises $40M to Bring AI Phone Agents to Contact Centers

Millions of people around the world engaged with their favorite brands this month with Regal – buying home insurance from Kin, deciding to attend Harvard, getting roadside assistance from AAA, and getting critical medicine from Ro.

Regal has built the most data-driven, customer-centric Contact Center Software (CCaaS) on the market. To date, brands have used Regal to treat customers like royalty by understanding customer intent signals, and automatically personalizing multi-touch inbound and outbound interactions from their human agents. And over the last 4 years, Regal has grown to help hundreds of brands stand out – leading to $5B in revenue driven through improved customer acquisition, sales, support and retention.

We just raised $40M to accelerate our mission of building the new standard in high-touch customer communication with the rollout of our exceptional AI Phone Agents for contact centers.
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“Regal’s AI Phone Agents have been a game-changer for our sales calls. Its features are seamlessly integrated into our workflow, allowing us to test, stay compliant, and keep improving our results every step of the way.” - James Hummer, VP of Sales, Ethos

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Contact centers are in a rut
For 30 years, consumers have gotten used to the joy of online shopping, and the pain of engaging with an online retailer’s contact center. Large early online retailers saw contact centers as an unnecessary cost center so legacy CCaaS providers have been focused on building tools to lower contact center costs by outbounding to millions of customers with one-size-fits-all strategies, and deflecting inbound customers to self-serve and to lower cost channels like deterministic chat bots. Unsurprisingly, customer satisfaction with contact centers and the legacy “low-touch” model is at an all time low.

Consumers are now pushing more complex, high-consideration and high-touch industries online (ie. education, healthcare, banking, and all manner of local services) at lightning speed, and legacy contact center strategies that were passable for selling CDs, are causing massive failures for selling home insurance online. It’s the perfect opportunity to reimagine the core contact center software ground up, with your customer at the center.
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“I am amazed at what Regal’s AI Phone Agents are capable of. Regal is helping us stay well ahead of our competition.” - Niraj Patel, CTO at LiveEasy

What we are building

There is a better way to build the exact contact center software your business needs, and orchestrate the entire customer experience from marketing, self-serve, inbound and proactive outbound. Instead of optimizing to treat every customer the same at the lowest cost, we aim to reach the right customer with the right message at the right time. Our unified data model, easy-to-use automation and native AI helps ensure personalization instead of stifling it:

• System of record - We started with the modern system of record for consumer brands. Regal flexible data schema and custom objects can match your unique data model. We handle real-time data streaming and will automatically ingest and understand all of your data so you are not delayed in engaging customers. Common data sources include your CRM and CDP, and we can extract key insights from customer conversations on the fly.
  
  
• Customer-centric automation - Regal enables you to turn your untapped customer data and conversations into outbound and inbound automated journeys that customize the experience of every customer. Drive faster speed-to-lead and speed to answer, while using the drag-and-drop interface to A/B test and adapt to better customer experiences without an engineering team.
  
  
• Omni-channel - Orchestrate your entire contact center strategy from one platform, leveraging digital channels like sms/mms, email, agentless calls, ringless voicemail drop, video, and webchat alongside high-quality voice. And use webhooks to extend the orchestration to other platforms.

• Super-human agents and super managers - We built the agent desktop and manager tools we always wanted. Context for every past customer touch, clear tasks, easy follow ups, and AI-native features like conversation intelligence and automated QA to make life easier.

• AI Agents - Autonomously handle millions of inbound and outbound interactions using AI that acts human, at a fraction of the cost of a human agent.

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Why focus on AI Phone Agents?

We continuously ship powerful features to help our customers drive more high-touch experiences at a lower cost and in a more scalable way. AI Phone Agents play a major role in that.

Our mission is to have brands reach the right customer with the right message at the right time, and generative AI Agents hold the promise of high-quality, personalized, affordable customer interactions. Moreover, based on the rate of improvement, we believe that 10 years from now the majority of contact center interactions will be autonomous, so we are all in.

While we offer AI SMS Agents, consumers still prefer to talk with brands on the phone, especially for high consideration industries like healthcare, education, insurance, lending and local services. Today our AI Phone Agents are handling a significant portion of inbound and outbound calls for customers and outperforming human agents in many cases.

AI Phone Agents that act human

Consumers are highly sensitive to the flow of a voice conversation. Our team focused on teaching the AI Agents to respond quickly – even on the phone – and naturally – even if interrupted or the customer changed languages. Our AI Agents will even mirror the consumers’ sentiment and tone to keep the customer properly engaged. We are very proud of the results of our continued investment, and consumers love interacting with our AI Phone Agents.

We took advantage of the tens of millions of interactions already happening monthly to ensure our AI Phone Agents were ready for you from day one without months of training. Our AI Phone Agents also speak the language of your brand, stay within the guardrails set, handle sequential steps, and use the 1st party customer data already in Regal to personalize the conversation using everything from their name and birthday to the last conversation and preferences.

When next steps are needed, our AI Phone Agents can easily update data in internal systems. But more importantly, they can take action including sending out sms or email follow up, live transfering to human agents for escalation or next steps, or even scheduling follow up calls or tasks.

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Ready for prime time

Our founders and customers have run large scale contact centers so Regal comes with the tools CX leaders and contact center managers need to be able to put AI Agents into production: A/B testing, real time monitoring, listen/barge, automated QA, recording, conversation intelligence, and reporting. Easily identify trends like a new logistics issue, escalate emerging issues based on sentiment or danger words like “throw-up”, test new scripts without requiring agent downtime, generate reports by disposition, keep your compliance team in the loop, and integrate AI Agent data directly into your existing tech stack.

Regal AI Agents are ready to go live in the most complex contact center environments in days because there is no rip and replace. Often it’s as easy as forwarding inbound calls to Regal before or after an IVR, or triggering outbound calls from Regal based on new leads submission.

Regal’s AI Phone Agents can work well with your existing contact center software, and scale up or down on demand so you can transition on your timeline without interrupting your current agents. 

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Give us a call

Hold times are for the old times and issues with “speed-to-lead” can disappear as well – there is no need to ever keep a customer waiting or deflect them to self-serve/chatbots now that you can offer high-quality phone interactions at a fraction of the cost. Regal is here to help you treat your customers like royalty.

Want to experience it for yourself? Your AI Phone Agent is ready at https://www.regal.io/ai-phone-agent/your-ai-phone-agent-is-ready.

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