SEPTEMBER 2023 RELEASES
September 2023 Releases
Debunking AI Agent Fears: "Will the AI lack empathy?"
Sure, AI agents are the way forward, but how can they possibly handle sensitive conversations without sounding cold or robotic?
They can talk. They can sound good. But can they care?
It’s a fair concern. Especially in industries like healthcare, financial services, or education, where empathy is a direct driver of revenue.
Like many other AI agent fears, this one misses the full picture. Here, we’re going to show you why.
With the right design and controls, AI agents can be built to deliver empathetic, human-like interactions for all of your routine contact center interactions—and do so self-sufficiently, 24 hours a day, without the burnout, without getting impatient.
The Scenario You’re Probably Dreading
A customer calls in stressed or vulnerable—maybe about a denied insurance claim, an urgent medical test result, or an unexpected billing error.
Instead of a warm, understanding voice, they’re met with a cold, mechanical script that sounds anything but human.
In that moment, the customer feels like a transaction. They feel dismissed. They hang-up, they drop out of the funnel. Maybe they churn entirely.
Why Humans Have the Same Problem (And Why AI Can Actually Be Better)
The truth? Humans struggle with empathy, too.
Junior and offshore agents especially. They’re disconnected from your brand, work long hours, and have a limit to their patience on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
In general:
- Agents get burned out: Burnout leads to shorter tempers, disengagement, and indifference. Even great reps can sound bored, robotic, or impatient after handling their 50th, "where’s my refund?" call of the day.
- Bad days happen: Humans come with a (literal) world of uncontrollable circumstances—life events, world events, stress. They can lose patience. They get frustrated. Emotional consistency is nearly impossible to maintain at scale.
Empathy requires energy, and humans don’t have unlimited energy. But AI agents do.
AI also gives you an advantage that human teams don’t: full control.
With AI, you decide the tone, voice, pacing, and emotional range. You design the human-like characteristics of the AI, and then it works like a machine—no burnout, no mood swings, and 24/7 availability.
All while costing less than your human agents, and freeing up time for your human agents to drive the conversations that need the most empathy.
With Regal, there are plenty of creative ways that you can design AI voice agents to protect against conversations feeling cold, robotic, or plain rude.
Designing Empathy Into Your Voice AI
There are two main ways to ensure your AI conversations have the right level of empathy for every situation.
Strategy #1: Match Deployment to Customer Signals
Don't force AI into conversations it can’t handle.
AI is not going to replace every conversation (not now, at least).
Some calls require a human touch—complex complaints, health-related disclosures, VIP customer expectations.
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Right-fitting your AI deployment means being aware of both who is calling and what their relationship with your brand already looks like.
When You Might Choose a Human Over an AI Agent
AI agents can do a better job of neutrally or positively addressing common customer frustrations on most calls.
That said, human nuance, memory, and flexibility will typically drive better outcomes in the following scenarios:
- Delivering critical or life-impacting information: In healthcare or other regulated industries, it’s often best to have a qualified human—like a doctor—deliver test results or treatment guidance. Not only for compliance, but because humans are better equipped to respond to difficult, emotionally charged questions.
- Managing high-intent or late-stage sales conversations: If someone is close to converting, a live, qualified agent can better read between the lines, overcome objections, and bring the deal across the finish line with confidence.
- Supporting VIPs or account-managed relationships: For customers with assigned reps or long-standing relationships, AI can feel like a step backward. A human touch reinforces trust and continuity—especially when expectations are already high.
- Handling complex, multi-issue service cases: AI agents thrive when the goal is clear and the scope is tight. While it’s technically possible to train an AI to handle dozens of branching support scenarios, doing so can require bloated prompts and degrade performance. Instead of building one agent to handle everything, the better strategy is to build specialized agents—each focused on a specific high-volume issue—and leave the tangled, edge-case conversations to humans. This lets your team cover most of your support surface area with AI, while reserving agents for the interactions that make the most of their expertise.
- Interacting with emotionally sensitive or historically frustrated contacts: Some customers require a lighter touch—especially if they’ve escalated in the past or shown signs of dissatisfaction. While you can route these contacts to a human for a more empathetic experience, this only makes sense in low-volume situations or for high-value customers. For everyone else, well-scripted AI (with proper fallback logic) can handle the bulk without breaking a sweat.
In all of these cases, specific customer data qualifiers can help you build rules to automatically route the correct conversations to live agents.
Sentiment-Triggered Re-Routing
Beyond static rules, you can also use dynamic triggers to re-route contacts to human agents based on call sentiment or increased status or lifetime value.
If someone’s interest, intent, or lifetime value increases, that’s a cue to elevate the conversation—so a human can step in and provide the white-glove service needed to close/resolve.
A/B Testing is a Huge Resource
Your AI agent will never be a “set it and forget it” venture.
Regal’s team of experts will help guide you through determining when AI should be used. Of course, there are always edge cases.
Within Regal, you can natively A/B test AI vs. human agent interactions to find your exact escalation threshold, identifying the precise moments humans need to step in, and proactively design for that escalation flow.
Strategy #2: Test and Fine-Tune Voice and Delivery
Choose the Right Voice
Start with a voice that sounds natural, patient, and trustworthy, and test from there.
With most of our customers, we’ve seen that female voices tend to outperform male voices when it comes to building warmth and trust in conversations.
Regal integrates with multiple voice vendors, including ElevenLabs, PlayHT, and OpenAI. There are a range of options to find the perfect voice for your audience. You can browse voices across genders, ages, and accents, and configure fallbacks in case your primary provider experiences downtime.
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And ALWAYS make sure to test.
- Before picking a voice, we recommend doing a few test calls to see how it performs.
- Continue testing with different voices (genders, ages, accents, agent names) over time to see what drives the best customer sentiment and outcomes.
You can, and should always continue to A/B test with different voices (genders, ages, accents, agent names) to see what drives the best customer sentiment and conversation outcomes.
Fine-Tune Speech and Personality Settings
Within Regal’s AI agent builder, you’ll be able to determine how your agent actually converses, as well. You can ensure an empathetic tone by setting and testing the following:
- Voice Speed: Set a natural, conversational pace. No rush.
- Voice Temperature: This is what drives emotion, i.e. neutral versus expressive. Add a bit of variation so the agent sounds more human, not monotone. For more variation and energy, set your voice temperature higher (1.25+).
- Personality/Banter: Inject some humor and friendly banter into conversations to make them feel less stressful, and to help your contacts relax. In Regal, you can also prompt AI agents to keep the conversation going as customers are waiting to be transferred to a human, so they don’t have to wait on hold.
- Responsiveness: Allow natural pauses. Quickfire responses sound robotic; thoughtful pauses feel more human.
A well-tuned voice with smart pacing can make the difference between "robot" and "empathetic listener."
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Key Metrics to Track
To ensure your AI Agents are delivering empathetic experiences, you can monitor the following metrics within Regal:
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis gives you a high-level read on how customers are reacting to AI-led conversations — especially important for emotionally charged or complex interactions.
If sentiment trends neutral to positive across most calls, you’re in good shape.
But if you start to see sentiment skew negative, particularly in specific conversation types (e.g., support escalations, high-intent sales calls), it's a red flag. It likely means your agent sounds too transactional or isn't handling objections gracefully.
That’s your cue to refine tone, tweak escalation logic, or consider shifting that call type back to human reps.
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CSAT Scores
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores provide direct feedback on perceived empathy, helpfulness, and trust—the pillars of a good customer experience.
Compare CSAT between AI-led and human-led conversations. If there’s no impact on CSAT from AI-driven conversations, then the AI is doing its job. If CSAT drops, you can start testing different voices, prompts, and escalation paths.
Regal’s AI agents regularly perform to 95%+ CSAT scores, across high-consideration industries like healthcare, insurance, financial services, homes services, and more.
Manual Review
Periodic manual review of a sample of calls is a good starting point for understanding why the AI might not be coming across as empathetic enough.
If you notice certain calls having a negative impact on customer sentiment, do some manual QA. Listen to a few calls to see if the agent is responding appropriately and naturally. In many cases, a slight prompt tweak or tonal shift is all it takes to right the ship.
AI Empathy Is Real If You Build It Right
Regal gives you all of the optionality you need to mimic the level of empathy that your best human agents deliver at scale. After all, you possess the empathy required for pleasant customer interactions, and you’re the one building the AI (with our help, of course).
Customers don’t walk away because they realize they’re speaking to an AI. They walk away because they feel ignored, rushed, or dismissed, even in human-to-human conversations.
With smart deployment, voice tuning, and continuous monitoring, your AI agents can make every customer feel heard, 24 hours a day. Without getting tired, snippy, or distracted.
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