1830 – Cloud Contact Centers with Alex Levin of Regal

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0:59with us right now alex levin alex you are the co-founder and ceo at regal you're found on the web at regal.io alex thank you for joining us yeah thanks for having me give us an overview again your website is regal.io but i'd love to hear about the impact that you have in the world who you work with and what you do yeah of course so my co-founder and i used to work at a large which is really the largest home services company in the world. It's now called Angie, which owns Angie's List and Home & Officer. And a lot of what we do now actually came out of that experience where as people started buying home services, whether it was a fence installation or remodel online, they were very excited, I think, to have an online way to do it.

1:44But they didn't like buying that way if they couldn't talk to a human being. And so we found actually that conversion went way up. if we did have a conversation with the customer. So even though a customer might find us online at Angie's List or at HomeAdvisor, we would then actually intentionally have a conversation with them. And that massively improved the customer's experience, leading to more people to buy. The trouble was there were no tools really built for that motion. Most customer service tools are built for deflect customers. You know, don't talk to your customers. God forbid, like somebody wants to talk with you.

2:15You know, it's the opposite. So where Regal started was, how do we help these brands online that know that they should talk to customers, know that they should have a personal touch, figure out what to say when and to whom? Because at huge scale, sure, it's easy to just treat everybody the same and spam everybody, but that's a terrible experience. What's hard is how do you treat millions of customers like one in a million, right? So what Regal does at its core is we allow people to use real-time data about what customers are doing, whether it's on the website or email or other things. to personalize cross-channel outreach, whether it's phone, SMS, email, to drive in these conversations that are really revenue generating.

2:56We work primarily in industries that are more considered. So think healthcare, financial services, local services, education, where people really care about having that connection with the school they're going to go to potentially. And today, we have a few hundred customers. We've driven about$3 billion in revenue for our customers. So it's a very meaningful way for our customers to engage with their end users. And I think our customers really love us because they're able to stop spamming people and start really finding the right way to engage with each customer. Yeah. Listen, as someone who's been studying and leading on consumer behavior since the early 2000s, I continue to be amazed slash not amazed, particularly in the services industry, since you were talking about Angie's list and Angie, how much opportunity there is to separate yourself from the pack.

3:53Like, I'll give you a great example. Like I just called a doctor's office. It was after hours. And all I got was a message saying, call back during business hours. I'm like, you know, boy, you know, you could have like captured the fact that I was calling. You could have maybe had somebody pick up. You could have had a text, you know, get sent back to me saying, hey, thanks for calling after hours. Listen, we're sorry we're not here, but we got your message. You know, feel free to text us, you know, just like that sort of stuff. I'm like, that should be common sense for, I'll just say, listen, business owners and founders that like growing their business and providing a good customer service.

4:32Yeah. So in healthcare, one of the sort of very sort of high level facts is when there is a negative diagnostic. So when like you go in and you did a test and you do blood work or whatever, see, you know, C scan, whatever it is, and there's a negative result, only half of the time does the patient come back and actually do the proper next step. Yeah, it does. If you think about it is it means it's worse for the patient because you're not getting it taken care of. It's worse for the health care company that's paying for all this because they're going to have to pay more when you eventually have a bigger issue because they wasn't solved up front.

5:07And it's worse for the doctor because they're not actually getting paid now for the service that they should be getting paid for. So everybody in the health care world is incentivized to get that patient to actually do the thing that's good for them. So healthcare is a fascinating example where patient engagement is one of the most critical parts of successful programs. The problem is, again, you know, when it was offline, you knew your doctor and they called you, whatever you might, you know, show up. But as it's all moved online and now on average, an American sees a doctor like two minutes a year, literally, you need to have systems of customer engagement that are going to do more than just send them an email that everybody ignores.

5:46And that's really where we come in is how do you engage patients in whether it's value-based care or not in a system that's going to help them drive to the actions they should be taking that are good for their health outcomes. Yeah. Would you mind getting just a little bit more tactical and talking about how your platform works and maybe some case studies or examples of companies like Kohler and others that are using your platform, like how they use it? Sure. So as an example, in financial services, SoFi is a customer of ours. So SoFi is one of the biggest student loan refinances in the country.

6:18Love SoFi. They've now since opened all kinds of other financial products, so people are using them for many things. So when you go online and you're trying to get a personal loan or refinance a loan, there is a self-serve flow. But a lot of people drop off either because it's too hard to do or because they have questions or because they don't want to do it now. And so what Regal is helping them do is use what the customer is doing online. So where they're getting, what data they're putting in, use what they're telling the support team, use what emails they're clicking on, right? All that first party information to decide what the orchestration should be, meaning what calls and texts and engagement that customers should get to make sure that they're getting the support they need to get their student loan refinance as an example.

7:03you know and for add-in sort of fun instead of the calls coming from a random number one of the things we were able to do is make sure the calls come from a branded number so when you're on so fi site and you get a call it says so far right so that's a much better experience instead of being this disjointed spam you're getting something an extension of the web experience and allows you to be looking at the site and talking with the person at the same time and really getting what you need so really like you know i think first principles is you know I, as a customer, what would I want if I was engaging with this brand?

7:36What are the key moments when I'm struggling to get my loan refinanced? How do I want the brand to engage with me? And that's really what we try to build towards. Yeah. And by the way, just on your website right now, stuff like branded caller ID, do you mind maybe just, can I ask you what that is? Because I suspect there are a lot of people that are listening to us that don't even have that set up. I don't have that set up for our company. I mean, we don't make a lot of outbound calls, but still, it seems like that would be something that would be pretty valuable for everybody to have. Yeah. So we at Angie used to call a lot of people and often customers would come back and say, hey, you never called.

8:15And we'd go, guys, we called you. You just didn't answer. So it's very frustrating when you're calling from an unknown number, people don't answer. The average answer rate for outbound calls in the United States is between 5 % and 10%, largely because people have been trained that most of these calls are spam. So one of the things we're doing is we want to stop people that are spammers, you know, people that are illegally calling you, people that are calling you too much, people are calling you for things you don't want. We want to stop. And we have a lot of efforts on that side. But the other part is you need to make sure that when it is a wanted call, they know.

8:45So one of the things we did when we first started the company is we went and worked with the cell carriers to make sure that it was possible to show the brand that was calling you on the phone. And you know, you as a company can go and get this set up. we only serve mid-market and enterprise customers, so we wouldn't help smaller companies. You're doing over 20 ,000, 30 ,000 calls a month. It is something that we have the ability to do. And basically what we're doing is vetting you as a business, make sure you're a legitimate caller, make sure the calling patterns you have are correct and not spam.

9:16And in that situation, we can then register with the carriers to have that number show up, not as a number, but as alphanumeric characters. We can even put on the device, on a subset of devices, is the logo and the call reason and some other things. There's a lot more sort of fun, exciting things coming down the pipe in telephony. So we're going to be able to do the same thing one day on SMS. There's even more sort of interesting capabilities that are coming down the pipe, but all in the same theme, right? Stop spamming people and start using engagement that customers actually want. You know, just to put a point on this, would you mind maybe pontificating for just a moment about consumer behavior today and why it's so critical that companies get this right?

9:58Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of interesting things. If I go and randomly ask somebody, hey, do you want a brand to call you? Usually they'll just say no. And I think we've been trained that way again, because so many of the calls we get are fraudulent or not helpful. On the other hand, if you go to somebody and say, look, you're applying to a new school, you live in Florida, the school is in North Carolina, you can't go on site for a visit, that you don't get what you want on the website, probably you're looking on your mobile phone. So you have a little screen, you can't get what you want. How do you want to engage with the admissions officer who's gonna help you out?

10:30Everyone's on the phone. So when it's something important, when it's something wanted, people like having that channel where it's very real time, it's not asynchronous like SMS, it's real time where it is faster. So people actually are able to handle issues quite quickly when it's on the phone, because there's quite a lot of nuance that you can express that way. And when it's on the other side of person, it's actually knowledgeable and helpful. We also support SMS and email and other channels. So I'm not knocking those. But people actually vote with their feet for phone when it is something they really want.

11:04And it's not a generational thing. I'm often asked, is it like the older generation wants phone and kids with SMS? No, when it's something important enough, everybody wants to be in a conversation. It's not that they will also use SMS, but they like actually engaging in a conversation. So what we find is our average answer rate across the whole platform for calls is 30 % plus. So if you're a head of marketing and you know that you can engage a third of the people that you want to be engaging with, that's enormously powerful. In the old days, with email only, maybe 3 % click. In the old days, with the spammy phone calls from a dialer, maybe 5 % answer.

11:45So if you can go and shift to a model where 30 % of the people you want to reach are engaging with you, that's a really powerful way to engage with your customers. That's huge, huge, especially if you're dealing with higher volume, like a lot of these larger companies. Alex, this is phenomenal. Tell me a bit about how Regal, I mean, so obviously you've gotten some really great market penetration. What was your go-to-market and how do you continue to grow? Yeah, so we are a VC-backed company, so we made the decision early to raise outside funds to accelerate our growth by spending more money on research and development early.

12:22great thing for our early customers, you know, because we have 40, 50 people constantly working on new features that they get all the time. So, you know, I think it is very nice to actually, as a customer, work in early stage startup, because they're building more new features. When you work with a later stage company, they might say they have a big engineering team, but most of their engineering is focused on just maintaining their current product, not building new things. So, you know, I think we are out there going direct to customers, explaining if you're doing outbound, why this is such a better solution, why they should ditch their dialer.

12:53And I think that resonates with people. I think that over time, we will continue to build direct, but we'll add indirect channels like, you know, technology partners and channel partnerships to make sure that we have access to customers through those sort of directions as well. It's very typical in our market for about half of the business to be direct and half to be indirect through the channel. And I think over time, you know, our product already serves some customers in Europe will open offices in other geographies to serve other geographies. And, you know, in the end, our hope is that in the same way, let's say Salesforce became the default tool for B2B sales, we'd like to be the default tool for B2C sales, these high velocity transactional sales motions or hop on motions in contact centers.

13:36You know, they don't have a good set of tooling today. And I think it's our opportunity to become that tool. Yeah. Alex, so to our friend that's been listening to us, your website, regal.io, who should be reaching out immediately? And what do they do? Like, what are their next steps from this conversation? Where do they go? Yeah, typically, we work with high consideration businesses, most commonly healthcare, financial services, local services, education. You know, if you have an outbound contact center or a sales motion, high transactional, you know, sales motion, you know, those are people that we can really help.

14:11If you look at some of the case studies on our site, you'll see it really drives quite a lot of value for our customers. Email us at hello at regal.io or just go to the site at regal.io and take a look at what we can do for you. Yeah. Again, regal.io on the website, when you go there, you can take a demo. It's all listed there. Just in terms of like the typical client, So again, solo agency, probably not the right fit, but where does it start to really make sense where you need to get a demo yesterday? Yeah. I'd say in a context-centered environment, our smaller clients, let's say we'll have 20 agent seats in Regal.

14:50The larger clients will have 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 agent seats in Regal. So like I say, mid-market enterprise, definitely not. We're not built for a small business. Right, right. Awesome. Alex Levin, thank you so much. Again, your website, regal.io. Alex, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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16:29Questions.