Garret (00:01.766)

Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Alex Levin (00:03.758)

Thank you for having me.

Garret (00:05.446)

No, pleasure's all mine. Great to meet you. Super excited to dive into the topic at hand. Why don't we start off with a little bit of an intro for the audience.

Alex Levin (00:15.438)

Sure, I have a liberal arts undergrad degree in philosophy and psychology. As I realized I didn't want to become an academic, I started looking at business careers and realized every business would be a technology business. So I became a product manager and learned about how to build technology. And eventually worked for a few different startups. And this company, Regal, that I started came out of my experience at other companies running marketing and contact center teams. Really what we saw is, you know,

people are definitely looking to buy things online. And some industries like basic retail don't really need much human interaction, but a lot of the industries people are pushing online now like healthcare, insurance, lending, local services, you know, I've always required some human touch and even online now require conversation with human being to, you know, actually disintermediate, disambiguate what's going on and help people understand what they're going to actually buy. And, you know, in those cases,

There's not great software today for how do you understand what customers are doing online, what kind of customer they are, and how are you going to figure out when to engage with them and what channel and what to say? And so that's what Regal really is. We focus on this idea of how do you treat millions of customers like one in a million. So AAA is a customer, for instance. How are they going to figure out who their members are, what they need, and in that moment, reach out, get the customer to engage if they're on the side of the road, and get them to actually answer a call and help them.

or Roman in healthcare as a customer, again, who's trying to really personalize medicine to each individual.

Garret (01:49.158)

Okay, let's unpack that a little bit first, just back up. So you said that you were involved in a lot of startups and then what prompted you to like say, okay, this is the one that I wanna start now.

Alex Levin (02:02.35)

Yeah, the last company where I was called Angie, we owned Angie's List and Home Advisor and a number of the other home services companies. And it was pretty funny. Like we thought we were going to build a digital only experience so you could buy home services online. And what we noticed is conversion rates were quite low if you only did it online. But when we had a conversation with a customer, conversion rates went back up. The challenge was that, you know, it's not how contact centers are built today. They're not built to proactively have this kind of conversation. They're built actually to like,

deflect customer inbound and like, don't talk to your customers, right? So it was a bit of a struggle to do that. And, you know, as we, as we sort of started looking around to other companies to see what they did, we found that a lot of companies in these considered markets, like financial services and education had similar challenges as they go great, like, you know, in retail, don't talk to your customer, I get it. But like in our industry, like we want to talk to our customer, we don't have the tools to be able to do it effectively without really annoying customers.

And so our sort of like first approach actually was go to our current software provider, which at the time was a product called Nice, you know, it's a big company and said, Hey, you know, we pay you $20 million a year. Can you build us some better tools to engage with our customers better from our contact center? And they basically told us to pound sand. They basically said, look, you know, our, their business, right, is to build customer service tools and deflect inbound.

you know, this thing we were asking about how to better engage customers was not something they're interested in, go away. And so Regal started as this idea of, well, there's all these businesses, these consumer businesses that know they want to outbound to customers proactively engage them. And there's no software providers out there building tools for them. Let's be that provider. And our insight pretty early on was what we're going to do very differently than other contact center tools is actually use the things you know about customers. So.

use the real -time customer information you have that is currently untapped to figure out what you're going to do. And that sounds like such an obvious thing because in marketing you do it all the time. But in contact centers, that was like not what was done. So the opposite, contact centers were proud of the fact that they treated everybody the same and they did it very efficiently. And so we're coming in with a new set of tooling saying, well, no, the goal isn't to treat everybody the same. The goal is to know who each person is and depending on what they are, engage them in the right moment. So if it's somebody who's a...

Alex Levin (04:25.358)

has a young family and they're looking at refinancing their student loans with SoFi. And in that moment, they can't figure out exactly what to do online, like being able to reach out to them with a branded call and help them understand what they need to do is quite valuable.

Garret (04:40.038)

Okay. Can you back up a little bit? Let's unpack a typical contact center. I really want my audience to be able to picture what this product is, how people are using it, because we all call our cell phone providers and our banks and we're talking to somebody sometimes. Can you talk about this whole deflecting strategy?

Alex Levin (05:00.014)

Yeah, so take a very common example. You know, in banking, people used to go into a physical bank and they'd open a bank account. And when they went into a physical bank, open a bank account, 98 % of the time they funded it. So Citibank is a good example where they were only physically located in the New York area. And so that was the only place you could open an account. So the internet was great for Citibank because now you could create this thing online on a website where you can go in and open a bank account. Lo and behold, more distribution sounded good, but...

only 20 to 30 % of people actually funded the accounts that were open. So that's a problem. If all of a sudden people are no longer funding their accounts. And so what they're trying to figure out is how do we actually get people to fund those accounts? Most of the tools in a contact center are not focused on that use case, right? Most contact center tools are focused on, hey, if somebody emails me asking a support question, what do I do? And that's where the majority of times as customers have all experienced it, the brand is trying to deflect you, meaning not.

have a human conversation because it's expensive for them and instead push you to self -serve or to a knowledge base or to something else. However, in this outbound use case, so in this use case where the person has come to the site, put in all the information, but just didn't fund the account, marketing was trying to do everything they could to go and get the person to fund the account, right? Because marketing goes, well, I'm going to send them an email, I'm going to send them a direct mail, I'm going to send them a gift, I'm going to spend money, I'm going to give them free $50 if they fund their account.

And so there was this weird mismatch where customer service was trying to spend less money on this person. Marketing was trying to spend more money on this person. So a lot of what we're doing, right, is helping marketing customer service teams get closer and say, Hey, let's see that this customer actually is in that moment where they just signed up and they didn't fund an account. Marketing is willing to spend as much money as possible to go and get this person to sign up. So let's give them this really tailored, very special human experience from the contact center.

Instead of trying to deflect them, let's try to engage them because we know it drives a better outcome for that customer.

Garret (07:03.334)

So a contact center, does it, I mean, are you talking just outbound? Are we talking about outbound sales or are we talking about responding? Like, can you give me a few situations where Regal helps?

Alex Levin (07:16.174)

Yeah, you know, there's a wide variety. I'd say a lot of what we focus on is proactive, right, is outbound. So, you know, as an example, we work with a number of life insurance providers. So Kin is a newer one online where you go online, you're looking for life insurance. What they've seen is that if you try to do it all yourself, it's quite hard. So they actually encourage you to, you know, give them your phone number and they'll call you and say, Hey, you know, can I help you get this life insurance product? So that's a very simple sort of sales use case.

A company like Roman in health insurance and we work some other sort of big health insurance providers, it may not be sales. It may be sort of a situation where all your doctor's information is going, all the information the doctor creates on you is going to Roman and at certain moments they're reaching out to you saying, hey, based on what we see is going on, we need to talk to you to help you. So we work with another diabetes protocol provider where...

Every time you're sort of getting insulin readings, it's going to them. And if certain things happen, it proactively uses Regal to engage the customer and say, hold, you need to go to the hospital right now, your foot is going to get taken off. So it doesn't always have to be sales. It can be support use cases also. But what you're trying to do is identify the key moments where engaging with a customer is going to drive a better outcome for the customer.

Garret (08:37.83)

So I'm in property management. There's always an emergency. There's always something broken or a toilet's not flushing. Those are situational though. Maybe back up and explain the business model. Are we talking about human beings that are looking at contact center screens and then they're instructed to outbound?

Alex Levin (08:59.79)

Yeah, so again, we tend to work with larger businesses where they have human beings in contact centers and they have tasks they're doing constantly. And so depending on the logic that is created, we can be sort of quite sophisticated now about what it is we want them to be doing and what to say. And that's what's novel. So historically, it was very hard to do that. Contact centers would sort of say, hey, there's this list of people. Call them all five times a day for five days, which is why you get spam.

So instead of that, we can now say, well, here's a very high value customer. We see they're stuck on the website. Call them right in that moment and have the call brand and come as a call from SoFi instead of from a random number.

Garret (09:42.406)

Okay, so Regal is a software platform that inserts itself and does instructions basically.

Alex Levin (09:51.662)

Yeah, you know, we manage all the orchestration for these contact centers. You know, when you think about a small business, like thinking in this sense, my wife grew up in a small town in Colorado, and one of her friends is an insurance agent and did very well for a long time. She knew everybody in town. People would walk in, she'd know their kids, their pets, whatever. She personalized everything at very small scale to those, you know, hey, based on what I know about you, you need this insurance product, this life insurance product. What's happened to her, even at small scale,

Garret (09:55.846)

Okay.

Alex Levin (10:18.83)

is more and more of her leads are just coming in on the computer, ding, and it's just a phone number. She doesn't know who they are, anything about them. She's trying to reach them. They don't answer. If they do answer, she's trying to struggle and figure out what they need because she doesn't have any information about them. And the quality of service has gone way down as it's moved online. And I think that's broadly what's happened, is the internet has created distribution, which is nice, but it's massively lowered our ability to, or in many companies, ability to service that person well. So.

for a situation like that, right? What we're trying to do is get all the information, the first party data about that customer in real time to the person who's actually gonna be talking with them so they can treat them that same high level of service, right? And not sort of treat them like they don't know who they are and just keep calling them randomly, which is not helping anybody.

Garret (11:07.174)

Okay. Walk me through the setup of a typical client. Maybe that'll help the audience understand better the product. somebody comes to you. I mean, what's, what's your ideal avatar of a company? You said larger companies, how many employees.

Alex Levin (11:19.342)

Yeah, certainly above 100 employees, a mid -market enterprise, what's happening is we're getting connected to their typical data sources, first -party data sources. So those are their CRMs and their contact center software and their email marketing systems and their website systems. They're telling us what is happening. And then we allow them to use that data to in real time decide who to reach out to with what channel and with what message. So.

that's the orchestration that our platform is doing. We actually take over all the channels, so the phone, SMS, email, so the agents actually sit in Regal as well, so we can have even more control over what is said in the conversation, and then based on what is said, what do we do next? So, customer says they're interested, certain things happen. If they say they're not interested, other things happen.

Garret (12:10.022)

Okay, and is that somebody flipping a switch, putting a radio button checkbox, or is the software doing that automatically based on voice recognition?

Alex Levin (12:17.902)

Now it's become very commoditized to do it automatically on voice recognition now. So we use AI to pull out all these concepts from the conversations.

Garret (12:26.31)

Wow. Yeah, that's blowing my mind. You know, I was actually going to ask you what your views are on AI because AI of course is a tool, but when misused, it actually depersonalizes the relationship. What are your views on that?

Alex Levin (12:41.07)

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, we're in a business where we've always wondered when AI would be good enough to take over more of the tasks of a human being. And honestly, for the four years we've been in business hasn't been good enough largely. And I've told people not to use it. About six months ago, we started seeing good enough, you know, generative AI that we started investing in it. And we started building things on top of the AI around, you know, how fast speed of response.

and how it handled interruptions and how it handled questions you didn't know and some other things. And now we've started pushing customers to use it. So, you know, if I played you the, you know, the AI agents we have now, it's shockingly good. So it's gotten to the point where people go, okay, that's good enough. Now we should be using it. We don't push for it to, you know, replace all the agents. Like at the beginning we put, we say, well, take all the use cases that are high volume and very simple and give that to the AI so that your agents can handle the more complicated.

But certainly in the next year or two, it's going to be in a place where humans won't be the ones doing a lot of this. They'll be managing the AI agents instead of doing the sort of rote tasks because it's gotten very, very good.

Garret (13:53.478)

What is the expectation or how do you set the expectations on the end user? Do they know they're speaking to a generative AI agent?

Alex Levin (14:02.734)

Yeah, legally you don't have to yet, but very soon we expect that that'll be part of the disclosure in the same way like you say, hey, you're on a recorded line. Like you'll now say, hey, I'm a AI agent. You know, I'm not human. In the end, we'll see what matters to humans. Like as long as the availability is high and the quality is good, like I don't think humans are going to care.

Garret (14:23.238)

So, I mean, I think people are more used to chat bots and the chat bot, of course, because you're typing with it, it's very obvious it's a chat bot. And then of course, you can always ask to speak to a human being and then it flips over to a live chat. When you're talking about an actual conversation, that's what I was really asking. I mean, if I'm, you know, my grandfather or somebody who's a little bit older and now they're speaking to somebody.

they probably won't know that they're speaking to an AI customer service rep. Is it better to disclose that so that it sets their expectations that maybe they won't get the answer they're getting or is that actually more destructive?

Alex Levin (15:08.678)

no, so again, in terms of underlying knowledge base, for a long time, the AI agents have been higher quality than human agents. That's not an issue. The thing that's been problematic is the interaction. Like if we're talking and I interrupt you or you interrupt me or I say, for a long time, that's what they say I was terrible at. Or it was always terrible at handling a question it didn't know the answer to. Like I will pick on Amtrak where I'd call Amtrak and say, I need X and they'd...

basically do a search in the background and give me the first result, even if that had nothing to do with what I was asking. So those are the things that AI has gotten much better at now, which makes it something that like you can actually interact with on a level that feels good. So, you know, it's not a question of like, if anything, the funny thing is part of what AI is exposing is a lot of companies don't have good documentation of their policies. And a lot of the human agents were just like learning it ad hoc.

And the AI agent doesn't learn ad hoc, it learns from like calls or it learns from, you know, a specific written record. So it's forcing companies to actually do a better job of documenting their policies. But yeah, the AI agent is much better at knowing all that stuff. You're not going to know it's an AI agent unless it tells you, like, it's going to be that level of quality.

Garret (16:23.718)

Yeah, it's almost like a movie, right? That Johnny Depp movie, I saw that a few weeks ago, the conception or whatever it was called. But no, I think so when we're talking about a personalized touch, personalized could be AI because it's outreach, right? Would you agree with that?

Alex Levin (16:44.782)

Well, when we talk about personalize, what we mean is using the things we know about you to make it an experience that's tailored to you. So, you know, a hundred years ago, somebody walked into a private, you know, a location of some sort and they go, here's your favorite table. Here's your favorite drink. Here's the music you want. You know, that was personal touch. Now, like you're not walking into a physical location of a doctor's office and I hope they're not giving you a drink. You know, it's now happening online, but.

we should be able to use the level of first party information we have about you to make you feel like it's such a special tailored experience for you. Instead, what's happening today is you sit down with your doctor and the first thing they're doing is spending 20 minutes reading this file because they didn't do it in advance and they're wasting your time. That's not a good use of your customer's time. So, you know, how do we use the information we know about customers and AI to massively improve the experiences that, you know, companies are giving us? That's the personalization.

Garret (17:39.366)

Okay. Let's, let's do a mock case study. I mean, my company only has 20 employees, so we're a little bit too small, but there's a lot of, DC backed private equity property management companies in the U S that have a hundred to 200 employees. Maybe they're managing 20 ,000 units. And that is one of the chief complaints. Walk me through a tenant that calls. Okay. And then what, what would the agents have in front of them?

Alex Levin (17:50.158)

Hmm.

Garret (18:06.438)

if Regal was inserted into that infrastructure.

Alex Levin (18:09.582)

Yeah, I mean, you know, take a slightly higher velocity use case, just as an example, like take somebody who's managing Airbnb. So there's more turnover. It's a little more interesting than typical commercial property management. you know, what's happening. So like, you know, somebody's going online, they're booking, whether it's with booking .com Airbnb, whatever some place, you know, maybe during the booking process, they're not finishing the booking. So.

If somebody called them in that moment and said, hey, I see you have two kids, a dog, and you're looking for something by the beach, like here's three other options, it could even help in the booking process. So now post -booking, somebody's deciding to go, could there be a call when the person shows up? So imagine all these doors have a keypad on it, and that's all IoT now. So as soon as the person puts in the code, they get a call, and it says Airbnb. And you know.

The person goes, hey, welcome to the Airbnb. I'm here to walk you through your thing. Like, you know, put me on video and let's look around together. Just here's the food, here's the this. And you know, I left you guys a bottle of champagne as a thank you. Again, that feels like a very special thing that like, well, you wouldn't do this for anybody. You're doing it for me because I'm special, right? So now imagine there's something that goes wrong. So again, a lot of these devices are IOT. So internet cuts out. You could automatically know the internet cuts out and call them and say, hey, your internet just cut out.

Garret (19:16.39)

Mm -hmm.

Alex Levin (19:25.87)

I know you don't know how to do this, so I'm going to walk you through the steps to reset the internet. Or your fridge just went out. I've just called three people to come and replace the fridge. Don't worry, you don't have to do anything. So proactively doing things without the customer ever needing to call you. Now, if they do find, let's say they break a board game and you can't know that because it's not connected to the internet, and they call in, you can at least know who the customer is and what's going on. That stuff is a little happening already. On inbound, there's already some of that.

But even an example, a simple thing we do today that doesn't happen historically is when the customer calls in, we can identify who they are by their phone number and automatically route them to the last person who talked to them. Now, I don't know why that doesn't exist in other systems. It's a little bit complicated, common sense, but it's not how the other systems work. But for us, it's just an attribute on the customer who was the last person who spoke to them. And if they are available, route them to that person. So.

Garret (20:09.894)

Seems very common sense, but yeah.

Alex Levin (20:19.854)

These are the small things that make a big difference in the experience that customer has such that, you know, when they then leave, they're going, my goodness, like that was unlike any Airbnb I'd ever have. I felt like I was in a five -star hotel. They're not just saying, like that was the same as what I've always had.

Garret (20:37.062)

Yeah. And what you're speaking about is what business owners like myself would want. I have number one, I have no clue how I would do that. Number two, if I could even figure it out, I'm just thinking I have to throw money at the problem, hire all these people. And it's still, how do you know when something is gone offline until they tell you? So this is really revolutionizing.

Alex Levin (20:59.118)

Yeah, but that's the transition is away from kind of the way of like you had one person who like somehow knew everything and somehow knew what to do to using systems at scale to make it feel to the customer like they're still given that level of service.

Garret (21:14.342)

So do you have to customize this for each company? Like I'm just thinking like, how do you even do this?

Alex Levin (21:22.734)

Yeah, same as like, you know, on the marketing side, email marketing, right? Email marketing for every brand is going to be different. You know, you have different emails you send out for different situations. This is like email marketing, but with human beings, right? So like you're choosing what calls, what conversations, what SMS has happened, depending on what situation. In one industry, there are a lot of commonalities. So if you said, hey, for admissions team in schools, what do you do? I could give you the 10 things that they do, but across industries, it's quite different.

Garret (21:52.038)

So how do you coach the client to, okay, it's fine to put this information in front of them to make sure that they're actually successful in that mission to whatever your software is telling them to do at that moment.

Alex Levin (22:10.478)

Look, for some companies, it's a big transition from thinking about customer service or this sort of thing as a call center. It's actually going, wait, it doesn't have to be a call center. This could be a revenue driver. You know, my goal isn't just to like reduce the number of, like a lot of companies are just going, please stop the customer from talking to me. Let's reduce it. Let's reduce it. Let's reduce it. All right, I get it. I get why that like happened, but you know, that shouldn't be the approach. The approach should be.

let's figure out which are the touch points that matter, that drive better outcomes, more revenue for us ultimately, and let's do more of those, not less, right? So, you know, we're constantly working with customers, you know, showing them what we see as successful in their industry and giving them some ideas, and then creating A -B tests basically and saying, hey, you know, you guys have this idea that if...

Let's say it's a company that ships something. If when the package arrives, you trigger a call and you have a conversation, it's going to drive more LTV, more lifetime value. Okay, let's try that. Let's make it so when UPS delivers the package, you get the notification to regal and you trigger a call. And you have the baseline where there's no call and you have the people that get the call. Is it more revenue? Well, if it is, and it's worth that human touch, then great, you keep doing it. If it's not, you stop and try something else.

Garret (23:24.07)

So all those touch points, you know, I property management is one of the things I know, but obviously I think the world in general is going more towards remote AI driven chat bots. And when the end user like myself calls whomever on inbound and you actually speak to a human being or somebody calls you back right away, it's just like a breath of fresh air. So, I really agree with your approach.

Alex Levin (23:51.022)

Yeah, but think about what's happening. Part of the reason it's a brush for fresh air is because you know that it's faster for you to handle this complicated thing in a voice channel. So voice is actually a very fast way of handling complicated things because you believe that the person on the other end will be available, is available, and that's exciting to you. Like maybe it's even midnight. You go, my God, they have somebody available at midnight. That's crazy. They know all the information. They know the right answer, how to solve it for you. Like those are things that AI actually does very well. So.

AI will massively improve our ability to personalize voice experiences for customers and serve customers better in a way that humans never could. Because humans are not going to wake up at midnight and know everything about the customer and serve them well. They're going to hang up on the customer and say, I'll deal with you at 6 tomorrow morning.

Garret (24:38.854)

So one of the missions that my executive team is on, and I mean, again, we're not a hundred person company yet, is trying to bridge that gap to provide a relationship with the customer. You know, again, that voice channel, right? Because it's with text messaging, automatic SMS, emails, you have to go back and forth at least four or five times. And then if you speak to somebody and then you speak to somebody else, it's like the, at least my customers,

get frustrated because they feel like they have to explain the whole thing all over again. Where does Regal and insert that level of trust so that it's consistent and then the client knows and likes and trusts the brand.

Alex Levin (25:22.798)

Yeah, look, this is a hard challenge for sure for all businesses. There's not like an immediate answer. Like, you know, our general take that I would like espouse is one, voice is important. So a lot of businesses think voice is dead or I think just wrong. So voice is an important channel. You know, for sure, you don't want to use it for everything or it gets too expensive. So it's important to have as much automation as possible where customers can self -serve on things that are not complicated.

And then, yeah, when it does get to voice, how can you think really critically about how you're going to make that a very valuable experience for you and for the customer? So if you're getting on the call and you don't have any of the contacts, you don't know who the account is, you don't know what the last person has spoken, yeah, it's going to be hard for you to do well. But if you have all of that and you're prepared and you know what to say and say, hey, I'm really sorry, this is the third time it's happened to you this month. Now, that's a very different opening than if you get on the phone and say, who are you?

Who are you going to piss off the customer? If you say, I'm sorry, this is the third time it's happened this month. They go, thank goodness somebody understands. I'm here to like, you know, figure out the next step.

Garret (26:29.432)

Okay, so what recommendations for a large company would you make looking to improve their sales processes through better customer engagement?

Alex Levin (26:39.662)

Yeah, overall, like don't think of contact centers as call centers, like think of contact centers as like another touch point with the customer in the same way you thought of an email or other sort of, you know, ads you might be doing, you know, might be a little bit operationally complex in contact centers because they are humans, but eventually may not even be human. So it would be less operationally complex. You know, then, you know, you need as a company to understand that your data and technology strategy or what dictate your capabilities. My experience is talking with even very well known businesses.

You know, a lot of them create crappy customer experiences, not because they want to, not because the people running the teams want to, but because the data and technology stack they have does not allow them to do anything else. So I'm going to a very big business the other day where the like data for everything that's like about a customer before they become a customer and the data for everything after become a customer, two different systems. And so they can't do anything like that happens across that boundary, which is insane for like, this is a company doing billions of dollars in revenue, but.

Because of that, they're massively limited in what they're able to do. So a lot of what we're doing in education certainly is important, but I'd say ultimately like a business has to decide that they care about being data -centric, customer -friendly, and are willing to make the transition in data and technology stack to achieve the outcome. Because you're not going to achieve it using 20 -year -old technology that doesn't have the capabilities you need.

Garret (28:01.51)

Yeah, I think the customer or the company has to be committed to it. What other pitfalls have you seen in your onboarding or even discovery calls when a company who wants to do the right thing is trying to do that more personalized outreach but doesn't have a product like Regal?

Alex Levin (28:18.926)

Yeah, look, the, the, even let's just say they're like deciding to go on regal. The funniest conversation I have is somebody goes at a very senior level and decides they want to use regal for whatever reason. And then we meet with the person doing the implementation on their side. They go, okay, the first thing I want to do is recreate all exactly the same calls I had in my old system in regal. We go, guys, if you just create exactly the same cause, the outcome is not going to be any different. And they go, but regal is a much better technology. And I go, it'd be better if you do the same calls. The outcome is not better.

So remembering that again, changing the data and technology is part of the story. But the other part is actually changing what you're doing with it. Sounds obvious, but not everybody, you know, thinks that way. And so in that case, aligning between the executives and the people actually implementing and aligning that like the reason you're changing the technology is not just to like have more stable technology, but actually to have a different type of engagement with the customer, which is going to lead to better outcomes. Can't tell you how many times I get that question of like, let's just like, can't we just like.

Do the same things we're doing now in your system and it'll be better. No.

Garret (29:22.886)

Yeah. Are there any strategies that you'd recommend to reduce buyer's remorse that you guys probably already have?

Alex Levin (29:30.446)

Buyers are more, in what sense, of people who buy Regal or of people who buy like your products?

Garret (29:34.246)

No, no, no, no, a product, right? So I think everybody goes through this, whether you're buying a Lamborghini, a Corvette, a car, usually that's the, you know, the biggest thing, but even in property management, they search and they search and they search, they go through a discovery call, they finally send in their contracts. And then, you know, this is what we try to do is don't drop the client off a cliff. Now that they've signed a contract, you have to.

Nurture them even more so they don't have that buyer's remorse and say my goodness i'm giving up control of my rental property

Alex Levin (30:06.382)

Yeah. Well, so it depends a lot on the business model for sure, but let's just assume we're talking about business models that are highly recurring. So think of like dog walking or cleaning or a subscription food basket of some kind where their success depends on you not using it once, but using it again and again and again. And so, you know, if you remember all these like famous examples of like how you, you know, in marketing, how you create behaviors, one of my favorite ones is around people brushing their teeth.

And so they found like that, you know, when people were brushing your teeth, people complained about all the like suds that came out, right? And what they found is they made toothpaste without the suds. And when people started using it, they used it less. Cause it turned out that by brushing their teeth with the suds being created, it was a feedback loop that told you you were doing something that was positive and that you kept doing it because you saw the result. Or another famous one is, you know, home baking.

People used to have to like put all the ingredients together and like it was very easy to make a powder where you just add water, you know, mixing it up, put it in the oven and it was done. But all these people came back and said, well, I don't want to do it. And they said, well, you told us you wanted something easier. That's easier. I don't want it. And they go, well, it makes me feel like I'm not doing anything. So they reformulated it so that you put in water and an egg and putting in water and an egg and mixing made people feel like they were doing something and it flew off the shelf. So this idea of if you're having a product that needs to be used in a recurring sense,

How do you create new behaviors that are self -reinforcing where people feel the reward constantly from it is something that gets used a lot in these subscription products. Property management is a little bit lower cycle of usage or re -upping, but same concept, right? How do you have multiple moments of that aha, like happiness moment so that it's constantly reinforcing it? And in every business, those were two examples, but it's slightly different things that you're creating.

Garret (31:53.414)

Yeah. So you just have to identify those. Let's, let's transition to what your views are on the future. I mean, you just mentioned AI and generative AI and how much it's changed over the last very short period of time. Where do you see the industry going and how does Regal fit into it?

Alex Levin (32:08.878)

Yeah, you know, I'd say if I even go back a little bit, you know, until the 2000s, everybody used on -premise phone systems. Literally there was a server at your office that connected to the phone lines and that's how you talk to people. The big innovation in the 2000s was, hey, this could be on the cloud. And all those like tools for customer service teams were largely like, it's the same software, but in the cloud, because that's cool. Look, that's not enough. You can't just say like we're the same tool, but in the cloud, like that's not an enough value for a customer.

So the transition we see coming that we're really pushing, leaning into is using customer data. And what, you know, the first party customer day, you know, about a customer to personalize what you're doing, whether it's inbound or outbound. And I definitely think like the world is going that way and AI will only accentuate it because AI is going to make it even easier to use all this data, right? It's hard for humans to process all the data, but for a machine, it's quite easy to like figure out all the data and decide like, what is the best time to talk or what is the best thing to say? So.

I think that is definitely the way it's going. I don't think that human conversation is going to go away entirely. There'll still be situations where there are reasons to engage with humans, whether it's a more complicated topic or something that goes off policy or a situation in which you identified the AI isn't as good at handling it because the policy doesn't exist, let's just say. So I do think there'll still be human stuff. But yeah, fast forward.

20 years, like contact centers is one of the great examples where AI is going to have a huge impact for sure. And people ask me sometimes like, what do I think that means in an economic sense? Well, two things. One, AI is a deflationary force. AI will be cheaper than the human, which will allow businesses to bring down the price of goods because they don't have to pay all the customer support, which means that more people will get access to good and service. So let's say it's a very high end thing that's being sold online, but a half of the cost is going to the customer service team.

If a cost comes down, they can sell the product for less and more people can buy it. So that's a positive. From the job side, for sure, there'll be a destruction in some of the jobs, but that will likely also mean a creation in other jobs. Like net -net, all these technology changes have, yes, destroyed some jobs, but created other ones. So in delivery, like maybe there's fewer jobs in stores, but now there's all these jobs in warehouses and in delivery, you know, sort of logistics. So I do think like it's unclear.

Alex Levin (34:33.23)

at the moment exactly what jobs they will create, but it will create a whole new set of jobs that were never even available before.

Garret (34:40.646)

Okay, no, there's so much to unpack there. But in terms of where do you see then regal fitting into all that ever changing landscape?

Alex Levin (34:50.83)

Yeah, look, we're very good at staying at the bleeding edge of what's possible. And when you're small, that's one of your advantages. It's like we have innovation, right? So we stay very close to the edge of what's possible with these technologies to allow our customers to use them and create a better customer experience or create more efficiencies or more revenue for their business. I think that's our job is to keep our customers at the bleeding edge of what's possible.

in this world, right? And sort of how to use contact centers to improve the engagement with your customers. 10 years from now, I suspect we're doing the same thing, just maybe it'll be new technologies we haven't even thought of yet, right? That are the ones we're bringing to our customers. But if you're a big established brand, it's hard for you to integrate novel technologies. It's harder for them. It's much easier to have a vendor like us that's always figuring out how to use it and what to do with it.

Garret (35:44.806)

Well, speak to me about databases because you made the example a few minutes ago of a very large client that had, you know, their two legacy systems. How is Regal doing this? Are you talking about APIs? I mean, all databases are an equal. Where do you get the data?

Alex Levin (36:02.254)

Yeah, so look, historically, the way this stuff worked at businesses is they had big databases, they updated on every six hours or every day. Most businesses have moved to more of a modern data infrastructure, a modern data tech stack where a lot of the customer data from what they're doing on a website or what they're doing in email streaming in real time into their marketing tools. So they might be using Interval or Braze or...

Clavio is more SMB or if you're bigger, maybe using Salesforce marketing cloud, but you're streaming into it all the real time things the customer is doing. It's gotten pretty common on the marketing side to do that. In the contact center, the contact center tools were seen as voice, SMS, email, they were seen as the channel. They have no customer data in them. So one of the big gaps was it wasn't taking in any advantage of this modern data stack. So part of what we've done is,

built a new real -time streaming infrastructure that allows data in real time to come in and affect something. So not a minute later, not 30 seconds later, but like literally as it's happening. So if you're clicking on something that can change in real time, the experience that you're getting, which is important in a lot of these businesses where, you know, if you, you know, in home services, whichever is the professional that reaches you first, when you have a request, wins the job like 50 % of the time. So.

fractions of a second matter in these businesses, because you're not going to answer like the five people who call you, you're going to talk to like the first, maybe the second. So like that's the direction this is all moving is having more real time data. Part of what we do for our customers is figure out how to unify it. So you know, you might hear know their email address, and here you know their phone number, and here you know their user ID, what you don't care that it's three different identifiers, you know, that's all the same, you want it to be on the same custom. So

We handle all that complexity behind the scenes for our customers of like how you stitch all that data together to make it usable for the things you want.

Garret (38:05.574)

So you're not necessarily asking a client to change CRMs or anything. You're basically being able to just make adaptations in there.

Alex Levin (38:14.734)

Yeah, we play nice. I mean, technically we don't call ourselves a CRM, but we are effectively a CRM. So we have customers that leave Salesforce to save some money and use us as the source of truth. You can do that, but we don't require it. So for customers who already have other databases or sources of truth, we're a very good data steward because we understand people in different data setups. That's okay.

Garret (38:39.59)

So you mentioned Alex that large companies is really your ideal avatar. What about a company, again, like mine, one to 3 million, 20, 30 employees. Do you see or do you have any services for the smaller clients?

Alex Levin (38:55.15)

Largely not. I mean, again, the smaller companies have the same needs. They're looking for how to personalize, they're looking how to grow. The major difference with smaller companies is they don't have the resources to invest in how to roll out new technology successfully. They don't have like a standalone person whose job it is going to be to manage the software because they're not yet big enough to have that standalone person. And so our platform, I'd say is a little bit too...

flexible, too complicated. On the other hand, like we have a company that we invested in in the restaurant space where they have similar concepts to what we do, but it's much more formulaic. Like it handles all of the inbound and outbound calls that restaurants need to do around booking. So when somebody calls in, instead of a human answering, like AI answers and takes a reservation, or if they want to check with somebody, if they're really going to come, they do it over the phone, it's AI. And there's many fewer settings, but for a small business, it's something that they can set up very easily.

Could you do all that through Regal? Yeah, you could set it up, but it'd be massive overkill in Regal and would take you four weeks to set up when it takes like five minutes in this like, you know, company that's built for SMP. So it's not that we couldn't serve that group, it's that we would be doing them a disservice and wasting their time.

Garret (40:09.83)

No, I respect that. And I think it's important to know your, like I said, I use the word avatar and clients. okay. Well, why don't we, I'll, I'll be getting your contact info. I'll throw it into the show notes so that, you know, your ideal clients know where to get in touch with you. But I do like to finish each podcast by asking the guest a question. So this is the investing to win podcast. How do you define success? What does winning look like for you?

Alex Levin (40:37.23)

as an individual or as a company.

Garret (40:39.83)

As the founder, the entrepreneur.

Alex Levin (40:41.838)

Yeah. Yeah, look, you know, one of the fun conversations that you have when you found a company, hopefully is with your co -founder or investors and what success is. And so, you know, for us, you know, for my co -founder and I, there were certain things that mattered to us. Like, you know, neither of us owned a home. So one day we'd like to have enough money to like own a home. Like one day we'd like to have enough money to do certain things. There was a specific dollar amount that mattered to us as an exit. So that was certainly part of it. And then there was another side of it, which is.

We knew we really enjoyed working in companies with a certain sort of mission and goals and way of working. And so we wanted to encapsulate that in the way in which Regal works. So we like to stick to certain ways of making decisions in your organization, hiring certain people with certain skill sets. And I think that's part of what's fun for us is having a company that operates in that way. So I think it's okay to have those dual goals as one of like, what is the day to day like kind of, and what kind of company you're building. And the other is like, what is the financial goal?

And we share that with employees when they start of like, you know, what Rebecca and I, my co -founder and I promise our employees is, you know, look, one, there'll be this category defining company that does this, you know, very special thing and in a special way. And two, we hope there's a good financial outcome for the equity holders, which include all the employees.

Garret (41:58.694)

That is beautiful. No, I've just recently gone over what we call PPFs, personal, professional, financial goals with every single one of my staff last week. And you're right, when you align those goals with the eventual outcome goal of your organization, I mean, you're almost guaranteed for success just because everybody gets energized and you're all going towards the same thing.

Alex Levin (42:21.934)

Yeah, yeah, you know, it's hard to know what people mean by culture till you've been at a company where it's not a good fit. And then you go, that's culture. But like my take in the 32nd version is like, if you agree with the way in which the executives are making decisions, you're in the right place. Not a hundred percent, but like largely you think they're making decisions in the right way, you're in the right place. But if constantly you're seeing yourself going like, how could the executive be making this decision? You're not in the right place. It's not to say like there aren't.

other businesses in that segment that you might like, but clearly that company, you don't agree with the decision making process, like it's not the right culture.

Garret (42:58.534)

Yeah, wonderful. Okay, well, thank you so much for joining me. I literally learned a ton here and I can think of a few customers that maybe could be using your services. So we'll definitely be in touch.

Alex Levin (43:10.51)

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Garret (43:12.934)

All right, take care.

Garret (43:16.934)

Just give me a second here to shut this off.