“Are you open on Saturday?”
Opening hours, bank-holiday closures and which sites are open when. Published on your site, asked on the phone forty times a week.
For clinics, practices & allied health
Take the front desk off the phone. Leave the clinical questions alone.
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.
The four calls that fill the morning
None of them need a clinician. All of them are answered somewhere on your website or in a document you hand out on paper.
“What should I bring to my appointment?”
ID, referral letter, current medication list, fasting instructions. Every practice has this written down; almost none of them get asked to stop repeating it.
“Do you take my insurance?”
Insurer lists and self-pay fee schedules are published documents. The assistant reads yours and quotes it, with the page attached.
“How do I get a repeat prescription?”
Process questions — how to request, how long it takes, where to collect — are the single largest category of avoidable calls in most practices.
Write the refusals before you write the answers
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
- Diagnosing a symptom or interpreting a result
- Advising on dosage, interactions or whether to take something
- Telling someone whether they need to be seen, or how urgently
- Anything about a specific patient’s record or history
- Anything that begins “is it normal that…”
When someone types something urgent
Rule 1
Say it plainly
The handover message should name the emergency number for your country in its first sentence. Do not bury it after a paragraph of hedging.
Rule 2
Do not triage
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.
Rule 3
Capture and escalate
Handover collects a name and a contact number so the practice can call back, rather than leaving the visitor with a dead end.
What is stored, and for how long
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.
Questions practice managers ask
Is this a medical device or a symptom checker?
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.
Can it see patient records?
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.
What about GDPR and data handling?
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.
Can it book appointments?
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.
Does it work for dental, veterinary and allied health?
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.
What languages does it answer in?
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.
Start with the opening-hours page
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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