SEPTEMBER 2023 RELEASES
September 2023 Releases
Debunking AI Agent Fears: "What if my AI Agent takes too long to respond?"
We’ve already debunked the fear of AI agents saying the wrong things.
Okay… So the AI agent has good recall, can deliver the right information, and pronounce things correctly.
But what if it just takes too long to respond? Lagging in a way that feels unnatural and unpleasant for callers?
We hear this question a lot from the market—and it’s a reasonable reluctance to have.
Here, we want to show you why this isn’t a valid reason to avoid AI agents. We’ll do so by looking at:
- Why your human agents carry similar risk.
- How you can mitigate this fear with Regal, while monitoring your outcomes every step of the way.
Let’s get into it.
Debunking AI Agent Fears: What if my agent takes too long to respond?
The Scenario You’re Probably Dreading
Your AI Agent kicks off a call with a crisp greeting, the customer responds, and then… Dead air.
What’s worse—it keeps happening throughout the call.
Contacts (and your CSAT) start dropping, all because your AI is taking too much time to “think” and give a decent response.
Humans Take Time to Respond, Too
Now, let us ask you this…
You don’t think your humans have done this? You don’t think they’ve ever forgotten a contact’s details or heard a crazy or sensitive question and found themselves doing a little extra “buffering”?
Of course they have. We’ve just normalized it because we’re familiar with it.
AI agent delays get magnified because you’re expecting perfection.
Human agents also take time to respond. And might even take longer for routine conversations, as they click through Salesforce and three other tools to read log notes and refresh on a contact’s data.
AI agents, on the other hand, can recall information immediately.
We’ve seen customer cases where they’ve had to intentionally prompt their AI to slow down because it was responding too quickly.
What’s different about humans is that they have a natural, built-in ability to stall.
“Give me one sec while I look that up for you.” Even filler words can do the trick (“um,” “okay”). It’s just a polished version of delaying their response.
AI agents can stall too.
You just need to prompt them to do so. Which now, can be done easily, without code, using Regal (we’ll work with you diligently to build, measure, and improve prompts over time).
Whether it’s at the start of the call, or as customers present delicate questions and objections, AI agents can respond with whatever tone and energy you want.
Even if your AI can’t give the caller a real answer, it won’t just sit in silence and awkwardly reroute to a human.
It can still respond however you see fit—whether that’s pure objection handling, consoling the caller, cracking a joke, or simply asking, “would you like to speak with a live agent?”
Whatever banter your distinct audience needs, you can prompt for exactly that.
Designing AI Agents that are Quick, Natural, and Well-Paced
Let’s check out the mitigation strategies you can build into your AI agents with Regal to make sure they’re responding and maintaining conversations with a pleasant, steady pace.
Mitigation Strategy #1: Conversational Buffering
Teach the AI to buy time with human-like banter to bridge latency gaps gracefully, handle objections, and maintain conversational flow.
Insert natural-sounding stallers like “Let me check that for you…”
Modify how much banter you want your agent to have. Do you want them cracking jokes throughout the call, or keep it as concise as possible?
How Regal helps you do this:
This is all done through no-code prompting within the Regal platform, which our team will directly walk you through.
Mitigation Strategy #1B: Have the AI Speak First
Another option is to have the AI speak first once a call is started, in case the caller doesn’t say anything right away.
This doesn’t mean the AI will talk no matter what, or talk over the caller. It simply means you can prompt the AI to begin speaking in cases where the caller doesn’t say anything off the jump.
How Regal helps you do this:
This is another exposed setting that sits natively within the Regal platform, and can be especially useful for inbound and progressive dialer calls. Regal supports both static and dynamic greeting messages.
Mitigation Strategy #2: Pre-Fetch Customer Data
Have all the relevant info from your CRM loaded up before any call starts, to minimize lookup time and enable instant responses.
How Regal helps you do this:
You can easily set up data pathways between your existing customer databases and Regal.
That data is centralized in the Regal platform—the same platform your AI agent operates from. Everything your AI agents do and say can, and will be driven by your unique data.
Mitigation Strategy #3: Voice and Response Style Controls
Make the AI talk faster (or slower) so it feels natural, and doesn’t feel like it’s lagging.
Depending on your demographic and the nature of the call, you can adjust and test the temperature of your voice to match the energy of the conversation, and set strict informational parameters to keep responses as concise as needed.
How Regal helps you do this:
Within the Regal platform, you can fine-tune the AI’s performance to eliminate awkward pauses and keep conversations flowing naturally by:
- Setting voice speed to avoid delays between prompt and response
- Configuring the knowledge base to prioritize concise, high-confidence answers
- Test different speeds, pacing, and personality across segments to find what resonates best with your audience
Key Metrics to Track
You can use the following metrics—which Regal tracks natively—to ensure your AI Agents respond promptly and pleasantly, maintaining a natural flow of conversation.
Containment Rate
Containment rate reflects the percentage of interactions the AI Agent handles without human intervention.
Is the AI actually “containing” the conversation? Is the agent actually being helpful?
A high containment rate means the agent is resolving issues, which means the response times are not an issue. Even if the AI at times takes a while to respond, it doesn’t affect your business outcomes as long as the contact stays on the line.
Hang-Up Rate
This one is pretty straightforward. High hang-up rates can indicate a lot going wrong, but can be a leading indicator that the AI is responding with poor timing.
Total Talktime
Total talktime refers to how long the entire conversation is.
While there’s right or wrong number for this (it obviously depends on the conversation), it can serve as a way to measure the overall speed of the conversation and how that impacts hang-ups and engagement.
For predictable, routine conversations, a substantial increase in total talktime would show that the AI is taking too long to respond (even if latency time is okay) or letting the contact talk for more than usual. That would be a signal that you need to tweak your prompts to make responses more concise, or adjust voice speed.
With AI, response times are up to you, not the agent
With Regal, you can engineer the timing of every conversation in its entirety—build in smart banter, pace the conversation to match your audience, and track every outcome to see what drives engagement and revenue.
You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope for a good experience. You can guarantee one.
Because when you control the latency, the personality, and the handoffs, there’s nothing left to fear.
It’s not about being perfect out of the box. It’s about building a system that can and will improve every day. That’s what you can do with Regal.
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