What an AI Receptionist Actually Does on a Chiropractic Clinic Call

You have phoned a company and been met by a robot. Press one. Press two. Press nine to hear these options again.

And somewhere in that experience you decided you were never going to do that to your patients. Good. Do not.

But that is a phone tree, and a phone tree is not what we are talking about. Most people judge phone automation by the worst example they have personally suffered through, which is fair — and also why it is worth walking through what a call actually looks like.

A real call, stage by stage

It is a Tuesday, ten to seven in the evening. You are closed. Someone has been putting off phoning you for three weeks and has finally got round to it, because now is when they got round to it.

The answer. The call is picked up in a few seconds, with a question rather than a list of options. No keypad, no menu. This alone covers the two situations that produce most missed calls: your line is engaged, or you are closed.

New or returning. The call splits early, because these two callers need entirely different things. A first-time caller needs the longer initial appointment and only the providers currently accepting new patients. An existing patient should be matched to their record, their usual provider and their usual visit length.

Getting this wrong is what makes automated booking worse than useless — a new patient dropped into a fifteen-minute returning slot causes more damage than the missed call would have.

Real availability. It reads your live schedule rather than a copy that drifts out of date overnight, offers two or three specific times rather than an open-ended ‘when suits you?’, and writes the booking back into the system your team already works from.

The handoff. They take the quarter past nine. By the time you unlock the door in the morning, that person is on your day sheet, and nobody retyped anything.

The part that matters most is what it refuses to do

A receptionist that knows what it is not will earn more trust than one that tries to handle everything.

• Clinical questions are not answered. They go to a person.
• Complaints, billing disputes and anything sensitive go to a person.
• A caller who asks for a human gets one, without having to argue for it.
• Anything it is not confident about is escalated rather than guessed at.

This is the single most useful thing to probe when you evaluate any system, ours included. Software that will not admit its own limits is software that will eventually say something to a patient on your behalf that you would not have said.

How to judge one properly

Ask to hear a real recorded call rather than a scripted demo. Any vendor worth using will have one. Then listen for five specific things: how long before it answers; whether it sounds like a conversation or a form being read aloud; whether the times it offers are genuinely free; whether the booking appears in your scheduler without anyone retyping it; and whether it knows when to stop and pass the call on.

Ten to seven on a Tuesday is not an edge case. It is when a large share of the people who need you actually get round to calling.

— Dr. Tom Preston, Full Circle Coaching & Consulting