How chat bots can boost your website revenue
Your clinic’s website is often the first point of call for potential patients, so making sure it’s informative and functional is key. But, even if you have a fantastic website that ticks all the right boxes in terms of its usability, look and content, you may still find that your volume of traffic doesn’t translate into bookings.
Chat bots are increasingly being used to help encourage enquiries and generate bookings but they can often be cumbersome and sometimes even put potential clients off.
Having worked in Silicon Valley and with a degree and masters in computer science, Jay Shah, who runs the Elite Aesthetics Clinic in Greenhithe, Kent, with wife and aesthetic doctor Shirin Lakhani, decided to have a go at creating his own chat bot to better fit the clinic’s needs. He called it Response Robot.
He explains, “I noticed that we might have something in the region of 10,000 people coming to the website over the course of a month but only a very small percentage of those would actually enquire.
“When you walk into an aesthetic clinic you are normally greeted by someone from front of house who asks how you are and gives help and guidance, but our websites don’t do that.
“So I built this bot to say hello to people and ask some basic questions. The way it’s been done its very conversational. It’s really easy and user friendly. I call it our front of house concierge and we have named her ‘Monique’, after our actual front of house team member and have used her picture to make it more personal.”
The second priority was to look at what the clinic actually needed from the bot so, rather than bombarding browsers with treatment information and lots of questions, Shah kept it simple and got the bot to ascertain a name, phone number, the treatment they were interested in and a good time to call. And it worked. The clinic saw its enquiries double and it also saved his team time.
He says, “My staff were spending a lot of time trying to get in touch with people who had enquired through the website. This has completely streamlined my business because we’ve got those leads coming in, we know when to call them and we know that they are serious, so we are not wasting time. It’s just turned the efficiency up by a factor of 10.”
Because the bot is running 24 hours a day, it also enables the clinic to capture enquiries more efficiently outside of opening hours. It then emails the conversation trail instantly to the team and Shah has set it up to write out to a Google sheet too in order to capture the data.
The bot has been so successful for the clinic that Shah has now partnered with the Consulting Room to roll it out to other clinics. So far it has been taken up by The Cranley Clinic, London and the Xavier G Clinic, Southampton.
Martin MacKenzie, client services director at Xavier G Medi-Spa Clinic, said, “I thought that our website already delivered a good number of enquiries but I have been totally amazed at how many more we now receive thanks to the Response Robot – we have doubled our website enquiries. I can say that without any doubt, this is the best investment we have made in our 15 years in business.”
