Today’s podcast is with Alex Levin, the Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io, that provides high-touch contact center software (CCaaS) that enhances sales, support, and customer retention with the help of AI agents and automated personalization. Alex joins me today to talk about the rise of voice AI agents and how they are likely to transform contact centers helping to automate the majority of contact center interactions by 2035, how AI is going to bring back the ability to treat customers like human beings, why the natural home of the contact center is under the CMO and and the intriguing prospect of agents in the contact center becoming very sought after and very highly paid.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The majority of agents don’t find AI useful in their daily work – Interview with Martin Teasdale and Ed Creasey – and is number 530 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Alex:

• There’s gonna be more and more use of voice, and particularly voice AI agents, in contact centers as the cost comes down and the quality goes up.
• Directing your customers to self-serve when you are dealing with a simple transaction is probably fine, but when it’s something more complicated and concerning something about your health, say, then that’s probably not the interaction that people want.
• Over 65% of people prefer to have a voice conversation
• Why would you ever waste time texting when you can talk faster?
• Why would you ever waste time holding on the phone waiting for someone to talk to, when you can just have an AI agent attend to your query immediately?
• There are things about AI agents that make them so superior to what we can do with human agents today. So not only is there an opportunity to make cost savings, but the use of voice AI agents is actually going to create a superior experience for a customer.
• The internet is great. It’s brought scale and brought down prices and all kinds of things. But we’ve lost that ability to treat customers like human beings.
• Strangely, AI is going to bring back the ability to treat customers like human beings.
• The customer experience is not about how do you create self-serve only, but how do you create the best experience for the customer across across the product, across the contact center, across everything that they’re experiencing.
• Why would we use everything we know about you to specifically try to not treat you the same as the next person and then intentionally try to move you to self-serve or move you to email or text because that’s cheaper?
• Human agents don’t have the ability, if they’re going call to call to call, to really extrapolate from the data they have at hand and use it to change the conversation.
• By 2035, the majority of contact center interactions will be autonomous.
• However, for the best brands, within two or three years, 90% of their interactions will be handled by autonomous AI agents.
• The job of an agent in a contact center is going to completely change from being as it is now to be more like a marketer, who needs to understand technology and data and create new campaigns, scripts or ideas that they want to test out.
• Instead of one manager for every 20 human agents, you’re probably going to have one manager for every five. You’re going to have more managers because the leverage you’re going to get from managers is going to be much greater.
• People in contact centers are going to be the front line, much like a marketing team, they’re going to be very sought after and very highly paid.
• So I think for people in the contact center, it’s an opportunity to learn these new technology stacks and start the sort of new operating model.
• The natural home of the contact center is going to end up under the CMO. A lot of companies are already starting to have one leader that owns both marketing and contact center.
• Alex’s best advice: Remember that a change in salary impacts you once a year but culture is what you feel every day. And, make sure that you think of past experience or opinion as a starting point, not an ending point.
• Alex’s Punk CX brand: Dick’s Last Resort and Patagonia.

About Alex

Alex Levin is Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io. He leads the GTM teams. Prior to Regal.io, Alex was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters, and then joined Handy (acquired by ANGI in 2018) as an early employee. At Handy and then ANGI Alex led growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA from Harvard.

Check out Regal.io, and feel free to connect with Alex on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by Robs on Unsplash