Regal.io CEO: Don't Make These Mistakes with Customer Outreach
The company has driven over $1 billion in revenue for its customers.
August 8, 2023
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Channel Futures: Who are the brands you target and why?
Regal’s Alex Levin: We don’t typically target a BPO. We target B2C brands in five or six industries that we call high consideration industries. So, for example, AAA in insurance, or SoFi in lending, or Aspiration in banking. They have existing teams that are doing B2C phone sales. The history in this world is you sort of you make one of two choices: Either you must use B2B software, which is like Salesforce-plus-something, which is built for a very different, very complex low velocity sale, or you have to use sales dialers and contact center software. This is just like dialing everybody for dollars. Neither of these is really great.
Most of the sophisticated companies end up on the dialers, and what that ends up doing is it ends up making money. We did it at Angi for a while. You probably have gotten the calls at some point if you ever went to Angi. It makes the company money. But it alienates customers and in the long run is a terrible business decision. And so we sit down with these customers and say, “Stop the old way. What you need to have is a conversation, but stop just alienating customers by treating them all the same. And instead start using real-time behaviors to personalize and orchestrate the outreach between channels which ultimately will let you treat millions of customers like one in a million.” Because they’re operating a huge scale.
How do you know who to text with what, and who to call and at what moment? Don’t call me 10 times. For everybody called once with a brand-new call, if they can come back and look at something, text them once and see if they’re still interested. And by doing that we get higher engagement rates.
The industry average for answering on a typical phone call is 10%. Our average answer rate across our whole platform is between 20% and 30%. We have much higher engagement rates with customers. We have higher on-call conversion, because now we’re talking to the right customer at the right moment; we’re saying the right things. So for brands, it pays off to be nice to the customer. That’s why we came up with Regal. The whole idea was to treat your customer like royalty. At the end the outcome is better than if you just use these dialers to spam everybody.
CF: How do partners get engaged with your company?
AL: We have a partner team that runs our channel program. And we invest heavily in our success. We believe strongly in the channel first and are willing to invest in it. So, we’re going through conversations with the big TSDs to finish the contracts with them so that partners can go through the TSDs if they want. We find that the ones that we work best with are ones that have worked with contact center technology and understand customers who have a sales motion. As long as there is a partner who knows contact center and has clients who are doing outbound calling, that partner is great for us.
AL: When we were running on Five9 when I was at Angi, and then on NICE (and I used to be on Genesys before), the way it worked is that they had an API, but it wasn’t really an API. You uploaded a CSV of phone numbers, and then it dialed through the list. That’s how it worked. And that way you built a campaign where you said, “OK, dial this list of people three times a day for five days.” That was the level of sophistication in those platforms. You’re not loading a batch list of contacts. We actually hook into our customers real-time data sources, so straight into what their users are doing on the website. Even UPS data for delivery information. Email data, too. Whatever it might be. We automatically create a unified customer profile with this time series data.
So our profile includes all CRM data, all-time series behavioral data, which is very unique compared to other systems. And then we have all the conversational data. So, every text, every call, every transcription … all that. And then everything that we do can be based off those things. If a user does X and then they do Y, then they do this other thing…we do something. That’s the core of what we do. I sometimes use the metaphor of the “Goosebumps” Choose Your Own Adventure series. A journey builder lets you choose your own adventure. The choice that the customer makes, the experience that they’re getting, is different.
CF: So your system is heavily based on behavior?
AL: We allow our customers to make it heavily based. You can have a first call that’s speed to lead, that’s fine. That’s easy. But then after that? Do you call them? Do you not call them? When do you call them? What do you say to them? Should you text them instead? For example, with high-intent customers, we’ll see that they’ve clicked on an email, we’ll call them in that second, because that’s a demonstration that our customers are thinking about us.
CF: How do you create the software to really do that kind of multifaceted tracking?
AL: What I’m going to show you is very common in email marketing; it has existed for 10-15 years, but this is very novel for phone or SMS, for most channels. These are called journey builders. They’re drag and drop, and you can have different actions happen based off different logic. You can have all kinds of logic statements — if/then statements. If a customer creates an account, then do something, for example. This can get really complicated. So again, we have access to the full customer profile, any of their CRM data, any of the behavioral data and any of the conversational data that can change what calls and texts and things are happening for them.
CF: When it comes to your competitors, how do you think you differ in that regard?
AL: Again, there’s a very big history of Five9 and Genesys having these predictive dialers. And everything else would have to be custom engineering on top of that, so that’s historically what’s been done. You basically build custom software to upload lists of people into the dialer and then the dialer just dials as fast as it can. So that’s the current state of being. There is still such a phenomenal business on the support side, that these companies are not greedy. They don’t need to go after what we’re doing at Regal.
When we go talk to customers, they all say, “Hey, I have trouble reaching our current clients for a variety of reasons. You know, my own call conversion could be better and it’s hard for me to know what to say to whom and how to be coaching and all that stuff. I don’t have the data I need to be able to make decisions about which calls I should be doing, and which calls I shouldn’t be doing. I’m not able to then go and personalize which calls and which tasks are going to which people.” These are well-known problems with every contact center.
CF: When it comes to your competitors, how do you think you differ in that regard?
AL: Again, there’s a very big history of Five9 and Genesys having these predictive dialers. And everything else would have to be custom engineering on top of that, so that’s historically what’s been done. You basically build custom software to upload lists of people into the dialer and then the dialer just dials as fast as it can. So that’s the current state of being. There is still such a phenomenal business on the support side, that these companies are not greedy. They don’t need to go after what we’re doing at Regal.
When we go talk to customers, they all say, “Hey, I have trouble reaching our current clients for a variety of reasons. You know, my own call conversion could be better and it’s hard for me to know what to say to whom and how to be coaching and all that stuff. I don’t have the data I need to be able to make decisions about which calls I should be doing, and which calls I shouldn’t be doing. I’m not able to then go and personalize which calls and which tasks are going to which people.” These are well-known problems with every contact center.
For Regal.io CEO and co-founder Alex Levin, his company’s name says it all. Regal is about treating its customers like royalty, which means meeting them where they’re at when it comes to contact, Levin said.
Regal is an “event driven” company. Its software reaches out to customers proactively when someone is likely to be receptive to a call or message from an organization — not a random spam call. The result is three times higher answer rates than average calls and higher engagement on marketing channels, according to the company’s numbers. How do Levin and his team know when is the right time to reach out to a customer?
Simply put, Regal designs a complicated system of “journeys” and tracks customers behavior through real-time data sources. This can be everything from what users are doing on a company’s website, to email data, to even UPS delivery information.
Regal’s Alex Levin
Levin said he doesn’t like to categorize the software as contact-center technology, although the basis for developing Regal came out of his frustration with the tools contact center industry vendors developed to connect to customers. Regal builds technology for the B2C sales market and less for the support side of the business, filling a void that wasn’t being met by contact center vendors.
Regal.io Sales Model
Regal’s new model of sales outreach seems to have paid off. Founded in 2020, the company raised $39 million last year. And it has driven more than $1 billion in revenue for its customers, Levin said. Companies such as SoFi, Aspiration, Kohler and the Farmer’s Dog use Regal’s product.
In this interview with Channel Futures, Levin describes the inspiration he and his colleagues had to create the company. He also talks of the expanding role partners are playing in the business model. And Levin describes the high consideration industries the company targets.
Channel Futures: Could you give a brief background of how your company got started?
Alex Levin: My co-founder and I come from mostly running big online B2C organizations. And the last one was for a company called Angi, which is the largest home services company in the world. A lot of what we do now actually came out of our experience there. We had this idea that, “Hey, the same way every e-commerce site sells basic things online and doesn’t have to talk to the customer, that’s the way home services should work.” We built a very big business with a self-serve flow where you come online and get a fence installation, get a remodel, get whatever.
What we found, and it was sort of shocking to us, is that the conversion rate online when you did a self-serve only flow is much lower than the traditional offline conversion rate of getting somebody to do a service. And we tried a million different ways of optimizing the funnel. There was a problem. And what we learned over time is that if we actually had a conversation with the customer, the conversion rate went way back up. And so what we were doing was engaging with them in a different channel. We were building some trust. And we were understanding their real needs in a way the product couldn’t. We were promoting a little bit with them in a way that a product online doesn’t. And also helping them make a bigger purchase decision.
Broadly, what we learned is there’s this category of companies that we call “high-consideration,” or sometimes people call “considered purchases,” where consumers are now expecting them to be online, but you can’t do it with a self-serve only flow. A lot of companies are seeing that, where the majority of their consumer demand shifted online — and they’re struggling to figure out how to add that personal touch that they know is important back into it. And so that’s where Regal sits. We provide for very large B2C brands the infrastructure to optimize that sales funnel, and it’s pretty intense.
From an AI angle, there are two big pieces. One is the after-the-call conversational intelligence, and the other is the automation of scripts and SMS, and things like that based on generative AI. This is so that better AV testing can be done. I think those are the two big AI pieces. Then we have all kinds of reporting suites that are necessary for these motions. I wouldn’t call this contact center software. And this gets to my point: I would think of us more like a sales software. For every incremental dollar that a company is spending on calls and texts and whatever, what is the payback?
So what we help them do is take any situation and do an AV test and say, “Hey, for this customer who is coming in to get hair loss medication or weight loss medication, what if we text and call them in this way?” What if you do that? Well, what if you do it the other way? What is the incremental cost to that engagement and what is the incremental revenue from doing that?’ Then it’s making the decision of whether they want to keep doing what they’re doing, basically.
See our slideshow above for more of the interview.
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