Why setting up EzyBiz Lex is a phone call, not a form

I have filled in a lot of onboarding forms. Business name, your name, the industry from a dropdown that never quite has your industry in it, opening hours in a grid of tiny time pickers, a description of your services in a box that gives you no idea how long it should be. I have built a few of these forms too, and I know the trick every product team plays with them: shorten the form, spread it over five screens with a progress bar, and call it a wizard. The typing is still the typing.

When we were building the setup flow for EzyBiz, the thing being set up was an answering service. Something that would speak to a firm's clients in the firm's name. It seemed odd to introduce that with a form, so we tried the obvious alternative. You type in your mobile number, the assistant rings you, and you have a two-minute conversation.

What the call actually asks

It is short and it is polite, and it sounds like a receptionist because it is written to behave like one. It asks for the name of the business, who urgent calls should go to, what type of business it is and, for a law firm, which practice areas you cover. It asks your hours, where you are based and which areas you serve, and whether you would like the line to sound professional, friendly or casual. Partway through it sends a code to the phone you are holding and asks you to read it back, which is the same verification a form would do with a text message and a box, only you never leave the conversation. Then it reads everything back to you, you correct anything it got wrong, and it tells you to head back to the app, where the line is already live.

That last part is the reason it works. Nothing you said went into a text field for somebody to interpret later. The details were structured as you spoke, the number was verified in the same breath, and the answering service was configured from the conversation you just had with it. You have, in effect, briefed your new receptionist the way you would brief a human one, by talking to them for two minutes, and that briefing is the configuration.

What a form cannot do

A form cannot ask a follow-up question. If you say you do "family law and a bit of conveyancing", the call confirms both back and moves on. A form gives you a multi-select and hopes. A form cannot tell that you paused after "opening hours" because Fridays are different, and ask. A form cannot let you say "actually, put my colleague down for urgent calls" halfway through and just take it in. And a form certainly cannot give you a feel for the thing you are about to put in front of your clients. Two minutes on the phone with the assistant tells a lawyer more about whether it is acceptable on their line than any demo video, because they have just been on the receiving end of it.

There is a skip button. Some people prefer to type, some are in a room where they cannot take a call, and the form is right there for them. I watch how often it is used, and it is used less than I expected.

The bit I care about more than onboarding

I am aware that "an AI rang me" is, for a lot of people, a sentence with a shudder in it. The reputation is earned. Most of the automated voices people meet are robocalls, scam calls, or a phone tree that was designed to keep them away from a person, and the newer, fluent voices are being used for the same things with better production values. Nobody should be asked to pretend otherwise.

But the technology itself does not have a moral position, and I think there is a respectable place for it in customer service when a few conditions hold. The person on the other end should know they are talking to an assistant, from the first sentence, without having to ask. The assistant should be doing a job that is a genuine service to that person, taking their call when nobody else could, getting their details right, making sure they hear back, rather than a job that serves the business at the caller's expense. It should know the edge of its competence and hand over cleanly when it reaches it, which on a legal line means it never gives advice, ever, and says so plainly. And it should be a door to a human, not a wall in front of one.

Held to those, a good AI voice is less like a robocall and more like a well-briefed receptionist at a firm that could not otherwise afford one. The lawyer who forwards their line to EzyBiz Lex is not replacing a person. There was no person. There was voicemail, and a client who hung up on it and rang the next firm on the list. The caller who gets a polite answer, in the firm's name, at seven in the evening, has been served better than they would have been, and the lawyer gets the enquiry on the file instead of a missed call notification.

Taste is a design decision

The difference between an AI voice that people accept and one they resent is almost never the model. It is the hundred small decisions around it. Ours are things like: it says at the start of a call that the call is transcribed. It does not do an accent or an impression of mateyness, no "g'day" and no "no worries", because a law firm's phone should sound like a law firm's phone. It asks one question at a time and lets people finish. It reads details back before it acts on them. It never claims to be a person, and it never pretends the lawyer is available when they are not. When it puts a call through, it tells the lawyer in one line what the caller wants, so the caller does not have to say it twice.

None of that is clever. It is the sort of thing a good receptionist does without thinking, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets skipped when a voice product is built to demo well rather than to answer a real firm's phone on a Tuesday. The onboarding call is where we hold ourselves to it first, because it is the first time a customer hears the thing speak, and if it cannot be tasteful for two minutes with them, it has no business being on the line with their clients.

For the record, I make EzyBiz Lex, so read the above with that in mind. If you want to hear the call rather than read about it, the demo is a phone number you ring from your own mobile.