The card at reception, as answers
Hours, fees you are willing to publish, address, and what to bring.
Clinics and practices
Answer the reception questions. Refuse the clinical ones.
Patients write after hours to ask if the doctor is in, what the fee is, and where to come. An assistant trained on that list can answer. Questions about symptoms go to a person. The assistant does not give medical advice.
A clinic’s WhatsApp is a second reception. People ask if the doctor is in, what the fee is, whether a report is ready, and where to park. They also ask what a symptom means. The first set can be answered from a sheet the receptionist already has. The second set must not be answered by an assistant.
We set up that split. An assistant on the website and on the WhatsApp Business API answers hours, location, fees, and what to bring. Anything clinical, and any complaint, goes to a person with the patient’s name and number. Staff attendance, if the problem is who was on shift at the desk, is WorkClave and a reader, which is a different purchase from the chat.
The list on the reception desk, written down
Hours for each doctor. Fees you are willing to state. What a first visit includes. Which tests you do not do in-house. How a report is collected. What the patient should bring. The address the way people actually search for it. Those are safe answers, because a human at the desk would give them from a card.
Symptoms, medicine, and “is this serious” are not on that list. The assistant is instructed to refuse them and hand the chat over. We test that refusal before the number goes live, including rude and indirect wording. If a test case gets a clinical answer, it does not launch.
Reports and appointments that depend on looking up a person are also a handoff unless you have given us a system to read. We will not let the assistant invent a slot or a lab value. It can say the desk will confirm, and take a number.
What the WhatsApp setup costs
The phone app is not enough for an assistant that replies as the clinic. You need the WhatsApp Business API. Our one-time fee for setup, integration, and Meta verification is ₹15,000. Connecting it to a CRM or the website starts at ₹10,000. Support after that is ₹3,000 a month, with a two-hour response on business hours, Monday to Saturday, 09:30 to 19:00 IST.
Meta’s own charges sit on top. A reply inside 24 hours of the patient writing is not charged. A template the clinic sends later can be. We are not tied to one business solution provider. The full cost, ours plus the platform plus Meta, is written down before you pay the setup fee.
The desk staff are a separate problem
If the fight is about which receptionist was on the morning shift, chat software will not settle it. WorkClave keeps the attendance record. A fingerprint, face, or card reader at the staff entrance can feed it. We confirm an existing device model before selling a new one. Patient attendance is not what this is for. Do not put patients on a biometric reader as a substitute for a booking book.
Computer at the billing desk that dies on a Saturday is the maintenance page, and in Lucknow the comprehensive AMC response is on site within 4 business hours. It is not included in the WhatsApp fee.
What the front desk already touches
These marks name products people in this work already use. They are not Mecverse customers and they are not endorsements.
WhatsApp
Where patients actually write
Meta
The Business API and verification
Instagram
Often how a new patient finds the number
Google
Maps and the hours listed on the profile
What changes
Built around the work, not the buzzwords
Clinics and practices whose patients already write on WhatsApp
A hard stop on symptoms
Medicine, diagnosis, and “is this serious” are a handoff. We test that before launch.
A published WhatsApp fee
Setup, integration, and Meta verification is ₹15,000. Support is ₹3,000 a month. Meta’s message charges are extra.
The solution
The pieces that make the workflow work
Website and WhatsApp
The same answers on the site and on the Business API.
No invented slots
If the assistant cannot see the diary, it takes a number and says the desk will confirm.
Staff attendance is separate
Who was on the morning shift is WorkClave, not the chat.
Verification included in setup
Display name and Meta verification are part of the ₹15,000 setup, not a surprise later.
How we put it to work
01
Write the safe list
Hours, fees, location, what you do not do. Leave symptoms off it.
02
Test the refusals
We ask clinical questions on purpose. A wrong answer blocks launch.
03
Read the handoffs
Each week, add the reception question that was missing. Do not add clinical answers.
Other solutions
Recruitment & staffing
Run the first interview before a recruiter gets on a call
Education & training
Close the register without rebuilding it in a spreadsheet
Software & IT teams
One queue for the Slack message, the Sentry error, and the GitHub issue
Customer support
Answer the questions you already answer every day
Offices & distributed teams
Attendance, the broken laptop, and the request that died in chat
Campus hiring
One first round for the whole batch
Voice and AI products
Stop rewriting the codec layer for every provider
Computer maintenance
A maintenance contract that says what is included
Questions
Before you get started
Will it tell a patient what medicine to take?
It is not supposed to, and we test that refusal before the number is public. Symptoms go to a person.
Can we keep using the WhatsApp app on the reception phone?
Not for this assistant. Replies as the business through an assistant need the Business API.
Does the setup fee include Meta’s message charges?
No. ₹15,000 is our setup, integration, and verification. Meta’s per-message charges and the platform subscription are separate, and we list them before you commit.
Let’s find the right first step
Tell us what your team is trying to improve. We’ll recommend a focused setup instead of selling you a stack you do not need.
Book a conversation