Most of what a practice reception answers all day is administrative and already published: hours, locations, what to bring, how to get a repeat prescription, which insurers you accept. CustomerBot answers those from your own pages — and refuses everything else, on purpose.
Scope, stated plainly. CustomerBot is a general customer-support assistant, not a medical device, a triage system or a symptom checker. On a healthcare site it should be scoped to administrative questions and configured to hand over anything clinical. You are responsible for the scope you give it and for confirming that deploying it meets your own regulatory and data-protection obligations.
Two of them are regulated categories we are deliberately not in. If you came looking for either, this is not the page — and that is worth knowing now.
A patient describes what they are feeling and the tool suggests possible causes or how urgently to seek care. Ada Health and similar tools do this.
Regulated territory in most countries, often as a medical device. Not us, and not something to improvise with a general-purpose chat widget.
Built for clinicians rather than patients: differential diagnoses, dosing guidance, answers grounded in the literature with citations.
A specialist category with its own evidence base and validation. Not us.
The front desk: opening hours, locations, parking, what to bring, how to get a repeat prescription, which insurers you accept, how to register.
This is us. It is the least glamorous of the three and by some distance the largest share of what a reception actually answers all day.
None of them need a clinician. All of them are answered somewhere on your website or in a document you hand out on paper.
Opening hours, bank-holiday closures and which sites are open when. Published on your site, asked on the phone forty times a week.
ID, referral letter, current medication list, fasting instructions. Every practice has this written down; almost none of them get asked to stop repeating it.
Insurer lists and self-pay fee schedules are published documents. The assistant reads yours and quotes it, with the page attached.
Process questions — how to request, how long it takes, where to collect — are the single largest category of avoidable calls in most practices.
The system prompt is where a healthcare assistant is made safe. Name the categories it must not touch, tell it exactly what to say instead, and keep handover switched on so there is always somewhere for the person to go.
Configuring handoverNever answers
The handover message should name the emergency number for your country in its first sentence. Do not bury it after a paragraph of hedging.
The assistant should never estimate urgency. “I can’t assess symptoms — please call the practice on 01234 567890, or 999 if this is an emergency” is the correct answer, every time.
Handover collects a name and a contact number so the practice can call back, rather than leaving the visitor with a dead end.
Conversations are retained so you can read transcripts and improve answers — 7 days on the free plan, 30 days on paid plans. Individual sessions can be deleted, all sessions for an assistant can be cleared at once, and the whole account with its data can be deleted from the account page. Anything a visitor types into a public chat window should be treated as such; do not invite patients to share clinical detail there.
The term covers three different products. Symptom checkers ask a patient what they are feeling and suggest causes or urgency. Clinical decision support tools serve clinicians with diagnostic and dosing guidance from the literature. And practice administration assistants answer the front-desk questions — hours, appointments, fees, insurers, forms. The first two are regulated categories with their own validation requirements. CustomerBot is firmly the third.
Broadly in three ways: patient-facing triage and symptom assessment, clinician-facing decision support, and practice administration. Most of the measurable day-to-day relief comes from the third, because the majority of calls a reception fields are not clinical at all — they are people asking where to park, whether you take their insurance, what to bring, and how to get a repeat prescription. Those are already answered on your website; they just are not answerable at nine in the evening.
No, on both counts — and you should treat that as a hard boundary rather than a gap to work around. CustomerBot is a general-purpose website assistant and is not offered as a HIPAA-covered service, so it must not be used to collect, transmit or store protected health information. In practice that means configuring it for public administrative information only, writing your handover message so it does not invite people to describe symptoms or share health details, and keeping anything patient-specific inside your existing portal. If you need PHI handled in chat, you need a vendor who will sign a BAA. That is not us.
No, and it should not be configured as one. CustomerBot is a general-purpose support assistant. On a healthcare site the correct scope is administrative: hours, locations, appointment logistics, fees, insurance, forms and processes. Clinical questions belong with a clinician, and the assistant should be prompted to say so and hand over.
Not by default. It knows only the content you train it on — your public pages and documents. It is technically possible to connect an endpoint as an API tool, but a public website chat window is the wrong place to expose patient data, and we would advise against it.
Conversations and any captured lead details are stored so you can read transcripts, with retention of 7 days on the free plan and 30 days on paid plans. You can delete individual sessions, delete all sessions for an assistant, and delete your account and its data outright. Read the privacy policy and confirm it meets your own obligations before deploying on a patient-facing site.
It can call a booking endpoint you configure as an API tool, if you have one and you are comfortable exposing it. Many practices deliberately stop at “here are the ways to book” and keep scheduling behind their existing patient portal.
Yes — the pattern is identical. The high-volume questions in dental, physio, optometry and veterinary practices are almost entirely administrative, which is exactly the band this handles well.
The free plan will index your practice website and answer administrative questions, which is enough to see whether it actually reduces the phone volume before you spend anything. Do the refusal testing during the trial, not after: ask it clinical questions deliberately and confirm it declines and hands over the way you want it to.
It detects the language of the message and replies in it, across 95+ languages, from your English-language pages. For practices serving multilingual communities this removes a real access barrier at the front desk.
Train it on hours, location and what to bring. That alone covers a surprising share of the calls, and it is the safest possible place to begin.
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