People are naturally mistrustful of customer service chatbots, and a great many people flat-out loathe them. A recent Gartner survey found that 64% of consumers wished companies would simply not employ AI of any stripe-not to mention chatbots-in customer service. Fifty-three percent would actually consider switching to a competitor if a company were to seriously consider replacing its human reps with AI.

Alex Levin, formerly a product manager at Thomson Reuters and ex-SVP of growth at Handy, believes most people hate chatbots because they've had bad experiences in the past.

"Contact center teams are very often only set on cost-reduction goals, forcing them towards low-quality deflection or horrific deterministic bots," he told TechCrunch. "At Handy, I was perpetually frustrated by legacy contact center software, most of which was made before the cloud even existed and required an army of developers and IT admins to maintain."

Levin believes that chatbots can deliver some really great experiences when combined with the right blend of technologies, and so he teamed up with Rebecca Greene, whom he met at Handy, where she was chief product officer, to start Regal, which builds AI-powered contact center solutions.

According to Levin, as operators we should keep going fast, make a lot of quick changes and also A/B tests, in that manner, operate the contact center as we saw others in marketing and product did.

Regal has phone- and text-based chatbots that can address regular service requests. These can detect interruptions during a conversation, so it won't lose its flow. The verbiage used also adjusts depending on a customer's sentiment-for instance, an apology when the customer is upset.

Brands can customize the language that Regal's chatbots use, set guardrails, and have the chatbots pull in data like a customer's birthday, name, and conversation history to make chats more engaging.

Regal's chatbots can also take certain actions acting as "AI agents," if you will. For instance, the chatbots can send out text or email follow-ups, schedule next-step calls, and transfer to a human agent if the conversation needs to be escalated.

Given the market for call center AI bots is going to be more than $10 billion by 2032, it does not come as a surprise that Regal has some competition. Got It AI is building a "fully autonomous" contact center; Cognigy provides a platform to build call center workflow automations; and OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor's Sierra is focusing on chatbots for customer service functions.

However, he is happy about the growth Regal has had thus far.

"Millions of people around the world engage with their favorite brands—like Google, Kin, Toyota, AAA, and Ro—monthly through Regal," he said. "We believe that 10 years from now, most contact center interactions will be autonomous. So we're all in."

Regal claims to count hundreds of customers, but this month it closed its $40 million investment round from Emergence Capital, Founder Collective, and Homebrew. The round brings Regal's total raised to date to $83 million and will be used for product development and to grow the 100 people in New York that it currently employs.