Regal.io CEO: Don't Make These Mistakes with Customer Outreach

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.