SEPTEMBER 2023 RELEASES
September 2023 Releases
8 Strategies to Improve Call Answer Rates by 40%
Outbound contact center call answer rates continue to decline, highlighting the fact that current outreach practices aren’t working. Legacy list-based dialers repeatedly target customers segmented by automation, resulting in “block this caller” actions and a 4.8% answer rate. I have firsthand experience with this: At Angi, where I was running a large contact center, we used legacy CCaaS dialers. We called customers until they blocked us. We lost revenue.
Businesses have failed to effectively address this critical challenge, but it is one that urgently requires attention. We all know that every prospect or customer who doesn’t answer the phone translates into a lost opportunity. The good news is that 90% of people prefer speaking to a real person on the phone rather than an automated agent! What’s important is how you go about connecting with them. At Regal, we believe in personalized outreach triggered by specific customer behavior during every phase of the buyer journey. This drives 25 percent more revenue than the dialing for dollars approach.
Improve Call Answer Rates
For starters, if your outbound call strategy does not include using Branded Caller ID, which allows you to display your company name and logo as well as other branding elements on the call recipient’s cell phone, you’re missing an easy way to improve brand recognition, increase customer trust… and reduce the likelihood of calls being ignored or mistaken for spam. Branded, event-driven calls boost answer rates by nearly 40 percent. Learn more about the power of Regal Branded Caller ID and key metrics for optimizing Branded Caller ID performance.
I also recommend the following steps to improve call answer rates:
- Check your caller ID reputation. Are major carriers flagging or blocking any of your calling numbers? If so, swap these numbers out for new registered local numbers to raise connection rates.
- Refine your scheduling capabilities. Focus your efforts on times your leads are most likely to answer.
- Track which call lists are delivering the most lead conversions. See what’s working and what’s not to make data-driven decisions.
- Strategically employ omnichannel messaging. Phone calls alone will not significantly drive revenue, and, most importantly…
- Customize contact center engagement strategies. Make outreach personal. Every interaction matters. Segment leads by intent. Interact and follow up with your most viable prospects faster.
In addition to these recommendations, I’m excited to share some thoughts about evolving AI technology, which is poised to help businesses not only increase answer rates but revolutionize overall outbound contact center operational efficiency. Read on to learn why adopting AI is mandatory for competitive advantage.
At Regal, we are rolling out new AI features designed to help you:
- Personalize connections for more impactful audience engagement
- Use customer data to enhance interactions
- Streamline contact center operations for better efficiency and effectiveness
- Scale and drive revenue
Let’s dive into how this can work for your business… reaching the right customers, at the right time, in the right channel, with the right conversation.
AI-Augmented Agents
The ultimate goal of AI in the outbound contact center landscape is customer experiences that mimic those of a small business owner, who reaches out to his customers in ways based on everything he knows about them… at an affordable cost.
We’re not there yet with AI, but today’s automated virtual agents (bots) are evolving into more sophisticated AI-augmented agents. “Super” agents supported by AI, which can provide 24x7 service not available from traditional human agents, strike a balance between automation and human touch. AI tools help these agents gain deeper insights to better handle customer situations.
I’ll give you one quick example: A prospective student at one of our higher education customers was trying to sign up for a course online. The frustrated human agent couldn’t understand the student due to his strong accent, but the AI-assisted agent understood every word, stayed calm, and, most importantly, successfully assisted the consumer. It makes sense to use AI to quickly perform knowledge lookups that can help agents provide the problem-solving answers consumers seek. We need to continue to automate relatively straightforward actions that instantly increase customer satisfaction, while escalating more complex scenarios to human agents to ensure positive experiences.
We want to improve the customer experience while cost-effectively managing resources. One way to do this is by optimizing the execution of and collaboration between AI-powered agents and human agents. Think of it this way…. some of us like to occasionally go to a small bookstore to get reading recommendations versus exclusively relying on Amazon to tell us which books we’ll like. Both sources are useful to us. When thinking about AI in the outbound customer center environment, imagine human agents as the small bookstore employees and Amazon bots as the AI agents. Traditional bots alone decrease customer engagement, can lead to customer dissatisfaction, and often translate into lost revenue.
We’re at the onset of this journey, and it’s compelling. Early adopters of AI in the contact center space are poised for measurable competitive advantage, especially midmarket companies that can gain significant market share over the next few years before larger enterprises join the fray.
Let’s look at what else we can expect from emergent AI moving forward…
Conversational AI Agents
We’ve discovered that for many use cases, generative AI phone agent models, versus the “super” agents I just described, do not require extensive (and expensive) training or tapping into a knowledge base, which slows response time. We can just feed the AI phone agent the customer-specific information needed to handle a call, including in what order to answer the customer’s questions. This human-sounding voice model takes less than 500 milliseconds to respond compared to the several seconds required by a text agent. These intelligent agents not only feel more human, they have skills we mere mortals don’t possess.
Perception and the Future of AI
Blending Efficiency and Engagement
Many remain skeptical about AI in terms of its ability to authentically personalize customer interactions. To some, it feels like an unempathetic, one-size-fits all kind of robotic approach. But at Regal, we believe that as AI technology matures, it will drive more customized and dynamic customer experiences at scale. Modern AI is designed to swiftly deliver more meaningful engagement, responding to individual customer needs at a fraction of the cost of human agents. While AI cannot perfectly handle every situation, it affirms a significant step forward in balancing efficiency with genuine customer engagement.
While future AI agents will surely be fast, sophisticated, and versatile enough to handle a myriad of complex scenarios, today, the best outbound contact center use cases for AI agents center on tasks that are straightforward, brief, repetitive, and with a single purpose. Examples include scheduling, validation/qualification, and payment information update calls.
AI allows us to anticipate customer needs. By analyzing past interactions and behavioral patterns, we can provide a level of personalization that was previously unimaginable. At a projected cost that’s about half the cost of human agents, with Regal Conversational AI Agents, you’re likely to improve call answer rates… and see a 40 percent uptick in conversion rates.
Learn more about the current and future benefits of AI for contact centers in The AI Advantage webinar, featuring my recent conversation with Marc Bernstein, CEO and Founder of Balto.
Latest Blog Posts
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AI Emotional Intelligence: How AI Voice Agents Can Keep Calm and Carry On
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5 Ways to Improve Agent Productivity by 5X and Boost Your Outbound Contact Center Performance
In this blog, we share tips to improve agent productivity for handling high volumes of calls, whether it's inbound support teams or outbound sales teams. The guiding principle is simple — focus your agents on tasks that absolutely requires their attention, and automate everything else.
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What are the Best Use Cases for AI Voice Agents in Your Contact Center
As AI technology continues to evolve, the use cases for AI Voice Agents in contact centers will only increase. By answering these six key questions, you can identify where AI agents fit best today in your contact center and plan for future integrations.
Insurtech Insights Presentation: Using Regal to Drive Revenue Across the Policyholder Lifecycle
Our Co-Founder & CTO, Rebecca Greene, delivered a presentation at the recent Insurtech Insights NYC 2024 event about how insurance brands can meet the moment of global uncertainty and rebuild trust by turning untapped customer data into personalized, revenue driving conversations across the Policyholder lifecycle.
Beyond CCaaS: How to turn your Contact Center into a Revenue Center
Why are so many contact centers stuck being cost centers? Why do they keep looking for cost reductions instead of revenue increases? Bad data and technology decisions are at the core of this issue. We need "marketing automation" (aka unified customer profiles, event-driven systems and a/b testing) like Regal.io in the contact center to empower teams to start looking for incremental revenue instead.
The Next Step Forward in AI will come from Consumer Businesses
Consumer businesses are implementing AI-enabled customer experiences without any change in behavior on the part of consumers, which is leading AI to become common with more speed than past transitions like the internet and the smartphone. And it means that the next step in AI will not come from the LLM providers. The next big step forward in AI rests in the hands of consumer businesses.
B2C Sales Podcast Episode 7: Innovating on Patient Care with Cadence CTO, Eric Hauser
Explore Eric Hauser's remarkable career journey from GovTech to healthcare disruption at Cadence, highlighting the transformative power of innovation, collaboration, with a special focus on the pivotal role of Regal in driving patient engagement and outcomes.
B2C Sales Podcast Episode 6: The Future of Conversation AI with Balto CEO Marc Bernstein
Discover the transformative power of AI in conversations and how Regal's cutting-edge technology is reshaping call analysis and optimization for enhanced customer experiences with Balto's Marc Bernstein on our B2C Sales Podcast.
eBook: How 3 Industry Leaders, SoFi, Perry Health & AllState, Treat Millions of Customers like One in a Million
Discover how Regal.io's AI-powered personalized outreach solutions are revolutionizing outbound sales and customer experience across industries like healthcare, finance, and insurance in our latest eBook, "Modernizing Outbound Contact Centers: How to Treat Millions of Customers like One in a Million."
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Introducing Collaboration-Native Features to CCaaS
Combining collaboration functionality into CCaaS workflow tools invites more cross-functional users from a company to participate in designing the end-customer experience, leading to better omni-channel orchestration and customer outcomes. Learn more about Regal's collaboration features.
How Regal.io is Turning the $40B CX Industry on Its Head
Jon Heaps, former VP, Channel at Observe.ai, Talkdesk, and inContact interviews Alex Levin, Co-Founder & CEO of Regal.io, about the history of the contact center industry and some of the key challenges teams making outbound calls face as customers demand more online experiences.
Major Changes to SMS and Branded Caller ID Regulations will Improve Customer Experience
Are you using Branded Caller ID for outbound calls or SMS? New SMS and Branded Caller ID regulations rolled out in Q2 2023 that you MUST KNOW ABOUT. The new regulations require that every company register their SMS campaigns and Branded Caller ID campaigns before being allowed to send texts or brand calls.
Announcement: Regal Conversation Intelligence
Regal’s Conversation Intelligence drives higher conversion rates for B2C sales teams. We use both the traditional QA/coaching tools, and brand new conversational triggers that allow you to update customer profiles and send automated follow up messages based on what is said in a conversation.
What’s the difference between Caller ID, CNAM, and Branded Caller ID?
Caller ID, CNAM, and Branded Caller ID all help identify an incoming call and, therefore, increase call answer rates. Find out how they differ and how outbound phone sales teams can utilize each to reach prospects and customers effectively.
How Regal Helps Consumer Lenders Achieve Growth in Tough Times
Our Co-Founder & CTO, Rebecca Greene, spoke with journalist Tony Zerucha at the recent Fintech Nexus USA 2023 event about how consumer lenders are using personalized phone and SMS sales outreach to obtain growth despite high inflation and rising interest rates.
Q&A with Perry Health’s Scott Chesrown
Get behind-the-scenes insights about Perry Health’s 23% revenue increase with Regal.io. Perry Health’s Scott Chesrown sat down with Regal.io and discussed how they implemented outbound sales technology, integrated new capabilities into their process, and built on their early success.
Drive More Contact Center Revenue With These 6 Holiday Tips
It’s the holiday season and you’d like to hit your December revenue goals. Outbound B2C sales during the holidays can be a major performance driver – if you're prepared and you have the right tools in place. Use these seven tips to get your outbound B2C sales in shape for holiday success.
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Supercharge your customer engagement capabilities with the Regal <> Braze integration
Existing B2C sales, service, and retention teams can now leverage Braze’s cross-channel messaging capabilities with Regal’s outbound phone & SMS sales platform to personalize their outreach, drive better customer outcomes, and ultimately generate revenue for the business.
Meet Regal Call Branding™: Branded Caller ID that Reaches 400 Million Devices in the US from One Solution
We are excited to announce Regal Call Branding™ including Branded Caller ID. Available on all 400M wireless devices in the US (as well as most of Canada and the UK), Regal Call Branding™ puts you in control of what people see when you call their cell phone – including showing your brand and/or logo.
Treat your customers like royalty
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