An AI Front Desk and Back Office for a Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic
A TCM clinic running bookings, reminders, reviews and payments by hand. We automated the front desk and the back office, and now the owner runs the day by messaging an assistant.
The Problem
A traditional Chinese medicine clinic. Busy, well-loved, and run on a WhatsApp number, a paper-and-calendar booking system, and a lot of goodwill.
The front desk spent its day answering the same questions: What time do you open? Where are you? How much is a consultation? Do I need to bring anything? In between, they booked, rescheduled and cancelled appointments by hand, chased no-shows, and tried to remember who to remind.
At close, someone had to work out the day's takings across PayNow, the card terminal and cash, and figure out why the numbers didn't quite match.
None of it was hard. All of it was constant.
You're Probably Wondering How
No new app for patients. No new software for staff to learn. No expensive clinic management system.
Just the tools the clinic already used, WhatsApp and Google Calendar, connected properly, with an AI layer on top and automated triage running in the background.
What We Built
1. WhatsApp booking and FAQ agent
Patients message the clinic's existing WhatsApp number, same as always.
The AI answers common questions: hours, location, fees, what to bring. It books, reschedules and cancels appointments directly in the clinic's Google Calendar, and sends a reminder the day before each visit.
One hard rule: any symptom or medical question is handed to staff, every time. The AI never gives medical advice. It recognises the question, tells the patient a practitioner will reply, and flags it for the team.
2. Review request automation
One to two days after each completed visit, the patient gets a short WhatsApp message asking how it went, with a quick 1–5 rating.
Happy patients get the clinic's Google review link. Unhappy replies go privately to the owner, so they can fix the problem directly instead of reading about it in public. Each patient is asked once. No nagging.
3. Automated payment reconciliation
Every day, payments from PayNow, the card terminal and cash entries are pulled into one sheet.
The AI matches each payment to a visit or sale, and flags anything that doesn't line up: mismatched amounts, missing payments, duplicates. A human checks the flags. The system does the matching.
4. Daily takings report
At close of day, the owner gets one message:
- Total takings, by payment method
- Number of patients seen
- Top items sold
- Anything unmatched or unusual
One message instead of an evening of spreadsheets.
Running the Clinic by Talking to It
This is the part owners like most.
The owner messages the assistant in plain language, like messaging a very organised office manager:
- "How much did we make today?"
- "Who's booked tomorrow afternoon?"
- "Which payments didn't match?"
- "Move Mrs Tan to Thursday 3pm."
The assistant reads from the booking calendar and the payment sheet, and either answers or makes the change.
No dashboard to log into. No training. If you can send a WhatsApp message, you can run the system.
Reality Check
We don't sell magic, so here's the honest version.
"Just by talking" works for daily operation, not setup. The one-time setup, connecting the WhatsApp Business API, the calendar and the payment data, needs a developer or a no-code tool like Make or n8n. That's what we did. After that, the owner just talks to it.
Reconciliation is only as automatic as your data feed. PayNow into a business bank account usually needs a CSV export or a bank API. Card terminals vary by provider (Stripe, NETS, SumUp and others). Without a direct feed, someone uploads a file once a day. Still far faster than matching by hand, but not zero-touch.
Humans stay in the loop where it matters. Refunds, cancellations of paid bookings, and anything the AI flags as unclear all need human approval. Medical questions always go to a practitioner. The AI does the repetitive work, and people make the decisions.
Outcome
- Routine patient questions and bookings handled on WhatsApp around the clock
- Day-before reminders sent automatically
- Google review requests sent to every patient once, with unhappy feedback routed privately to the owner
- Daily payment reconciliation across PayNow, card and cash, with exceptions flagged for review
- A single end-of-day report, and the whole system operable by plain-language messages
Is This for You?
If your business runs on WhatsApp, a calendar and a spreadsheet (clinics, salons, studios, tuition centres, physiotherapy, wellness), the same pattern works. The specifics change. The idea doesn't: connect the tools you already have, automate the repetitive parts, and keep people in charge of the decisions.
See our business automation services.
Outcome
4 workflows automated
Bookings, reviews, reconciliation and daily reporting automated
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