Mission
Call a business and you tell your story to a menu, then to a bot, then to a person, then to the next person. Each of those steps was added to save someone a minute, but each one drains trust with your customers.
What a customer remembers is the person who knew them, heard what was really wrong and sorted it out. No AI replaces that, and ours doesn’t try. Soja’s agents take the notes, look things up and keep the thread, so the people on your team can be the reason customers stay.
When an agent isn’t sure, it doesn’t guess. It brings in a person, and tells the customer who is coming.
A short history
For a hundred and fifty years the business phone got better at connecting people. It never got better at remembering what they said.
1878
1878
The first commercial telephone exchange opened in New Haven with twenty-one subscribers. An operator sat between every call, and the operator knew who you were, who you had called last week and whether the doctor was in. The phone system’s memory was a person.
1891
1891
An undertaker in Kansas City suspected the operator of sending his calls to a rival, and patented an exchange that needed no operator at all. The dial put the caller in charge of the connection. It also took the person out of the middle, and the memory left with them.
1960s
1960s
The office got a switch of its own. A call could be parked, picked up on another line and passed along. “Let me transfer you” was born, and so was the music while you wait. One conversation could now be split between people who had never spoken to each other.
1980s
1980s
Machines started answering. Voicemail took the message when nobody could, and the phone tree asked you to press 1 for sales. Then it asked for your account number, and the person who finally picked up asked for it again.
1990s
1990s
A distributor sent each call to the next free agent, anywhere in the world, with a script and a ticket. The agent had never heard of you. Your story was the ticket, and the ticket was whatever the last agent had time to type.
2000s
2000s
Calls moved onto the internet, and a business phone became a web page and an app. Any team could have a number in an afternoon. The conversation was still cut in three: a call log, a text inbox and a voicemail box, each holding a piece of it.
Now
Now
Software answers so that a team doesn’t have to. It is the operator again, except it doesn’t know you, and when it doesn’t know the answer it guesses, in the same sure voice. When it does hand the call to a person, “let me transfer you” comes back, and the customer starts over, one more time.
A hundred and fifty years of connecting better, and remembering worse.
What it costs
A customer gives their account number to the menu, then to the rep. A rep asks what a teammate already found out on Monday. A manager replays a twelve-minute recording to find the one thing that was agreed. Every transfer is a restart, and every restart is paid for twice: once by the customer, in patience, and once by the team, in minutes.
Minutes are the whole bill. Say a customer spends two minutes repeating their story, and your team takes forty calls a day. That is more than an hour a day of words that had already been said. We won’t put a number of our own on it. The honest number is yours: count the times this week a customer told your team something they had already told you.
To the menu
Four. Zero. Eight. One. Two.
To the first person
Account 40812. I was charged twice in March.
To the next person
Account 40812. Charged twice in March. The last person said finance has it.
Account 40812. I was charged twice in March.
AI agent
I can see that. I’m bringing in someone from billing, and they’ll have all of this.
On the rep’s screen as they pick up
Charged twice in March. The refund is with finance, due Thursday.
Hi, I’ve got it here. It lands on Thursday.
What we believe
The agent asks before it guesses.
When an AI agent isn’t sure, it brings in someone from your team instead of making up an answer. A short wait costs less than a wrong answer said with confidence.
The caller always knows what’s happening.
They hear who is joining and why. If nobody can pick up, the agent reads their request back and tells them when your team will call.
The number belongs to the team.
So the memory of every call on it does too. Whoever picks up can read it.
One customer, one thread.
Calls, texts and callback requests in the order they happened, whoever on your team handled them.
Handed over, not started over.
An AI agent and a rep can be on the same call. The agent stays, and the rep joins knowing what was said.
A phone has to ring.
On every device a rep uses. A memory is worth nothing on a call that nobody answered.
What we’re building
Three things the product does about it. The home page shows each one working.
Calls, texts and callback requests in one place, in the order they happened. Open the customer and read down.
Our March invoice shows two charges.
Sorry about that. I’ll call you now.
Call on the support line6 min
They were billed twice in March. The refund is with finance.
Callback request, taken by the AI agent
The refund came through. They want to know when the credit note arrives.
The agent told them to expect your call by 2 PM.
The AI agent asks for a rep. The rep joins with what the caller said on screen, and the caller keeps talking.
We need to change the seat count before the quote goes out.
AI agent
Sure. How many seats, and is Friday still right?
Forty-five now. Friday’s fine.
Hi, I’ve got it all here. Forty-five seats, quote by Friday.
When a call ends, what was asked and what was agreed are in the thread, with a follow-up on the right day.
Call on the sales line12 min
They asked for a quote on 40 seats. You said Friday.
Send quoteYou
FridayHow we work
The agent’s mistakes are ours.
We build our agents to hand a call to a person rather than guess, and we don’t sell a dashboard for grading them. If one says the wrong thing on your line anyway, that is our bug, and we fix it.
Say what happens.
No “seamless”, no “powerful”. The site says what the product does, and the product does what the site says.
Nothing comes before the ring.
A feature that makes a call less likely to be answered doesn’t ship, however clever it is.
Why soja
Soja is the soybean in German, Dutch, French and most of Europe. A soybean sprouts by lifting the seed out of the ground and opening it in two, and those two halves are its first leaves. They are the dot on our j. A conversation has two sides as well, and they grow from one seed.
The wild soybean is called Glycine soja, and it is the vine growing down the timeline above. It climbs whatever stands next to it and never needs tending, which is how we want Soja to grow into a team.