People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many downright despise them. In a recent Gartner study investigation64% of consumers said they would prefer that businesses not use any form of AI, including chatbots, in their customer service. Fifty-three percent went so far as to say they would consider switching to a rival if a company considered replacing its human agents with AI.

Alex Levin, former product manager at Thomson Reuters and former senior vice president of growth at Handy, believes that most people hate chatbots because they have had bad experiences in the past.

“Contact center teams are often assigned only cost reduction goals, forcing them to move to low-quality solutions or terrible deterministic bots,” he told TechCrunch. “At Handy, I was continually frustrated with legacy contact center software, much of which was created before the cloud even existed and required an army of developers and IT administrators to maintain. »

Levin, however, believed that chatbots could deliver compelling experiences when powered by the right combination of technologies. So he teamed up with Rebecca Greene, whom he met at Handy where she was product director, to get started Royalwhich creates AI-powered contact center solutions.

“As operators, we wanted to move fast, make rapid changes, do A/B testing, and leverage the contact center like we saw our colleagues in marketing and product doing,” Levin said.

Regal offers phone and text chatbots that can respond to common customer service requests. Chatbots can handle things like interruptions without interrupting the flow of a conversation and adjust their verbiage based on a customer’s sentiment (for example, apologizing if a customer is upset).

Brands can customize the language Regal’s chatbots use, set guardrails, and have chatbots pull data like a customer’s birthday, name, and chat history to make chats more responsive. attractive.

Regal chatbots can also perform certain actions, acting as “AI Agents”, if you want. For example, chatbots can send follow-ups via text or email, schedule calls for the next step, and transfer to a human agent if the conversation needs to be escalated.

While the call center AI robot market is expected to be value more than $10 billion by 2032, it’s not entirely surprising that Regal has a lot of competition. I understood it, AI is development a “totally autonomous” contact center; Cognigie provides a platform for creating call center workflow automations; and OpenAI President Bret Taylor’s Sierra focuses on chatbots for customer service functions.

Levin, however, says he’s pleased with Regal’s growth so far.

“Millions of people around the world interact with their favorite brands – like Google, Kin, Toyota, AAA and Ro – through Regal every month,” he said. “We believe that in 10 years, most contact center interactions will be autonomous. So we’re all in.

Regal claims to have hundreds of customers and this month closed a $40 million investment round from Emergence Capital, Founder Collective, Homebrew. This fundraising brings the total amount raised by Regal to $83 million and will be used for product development and growth of Regal’s 100-person team based in New York.