Your practice's front desk, open around the clock.
Prospective clients reach your site at night, on weekends, and between sessions. Chatref answers their questions, captures their details, and routes distress contacts to the right resource – so you never miss a new client because you were in session.
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Why this matters
Missed calls are missed clients.
Stop losing clients to voicemail. Chatref answers the repeat questions about fees, specialties, and availability the moment they are asked – day or night – so every prospective client gets a response before they find another practice.
Inbound Patient Queue
Patient questions arrive from phone, web, and walk-in, feeding automatically into a single unified front-desk pipeline.
Practice Knowledge Base
Chatref indexes your scheduling rules, FAQs, and clinic policies, verifying every response against your official documents.
Smart Output Routing
Most patients receive instant answers. Complex or clinical requests are routed directly to your office staff.
Answered Instantly
90%+ of operational, policy, and scheduling questions resolved on the spot.
Warm Staff Handoff
Escalated directly to your clinic team with complete patient query transcripts.
New-client questions arrive at all hours – evenings, weekends, and during session time – and converge on Chatref. Chatref answers from your practice knowledge base and captures every inquiry, routing distress contacts directly to the 988 Lifeline or your on-call staff.
The challenge
Half of all new-client calls to therapy practices go unanswered during session hours, and most callers never try a second time. The front desk is stretched between scheduling, paperwork, and billing – and the phone is
What goes wrong
Prospective clients searching for a therapist at night or on the weekend hit a voicemail wall. They move on. Existing clients who want to reschedule send a message and wait. No-shows stack up because follow-up reminders
The Chatref way
Chatref sits on your practice website around the clock. It answers questions about your specialties, fees, and availability instantly, captures contact details for every new-client inquiry, and sends reminders that cut
What you get
Four wins for mental health practices.
The big picture
Keep growing inquiry volume off your front desk.
Inbound Patient Queue
Patient questions arrive from phone, web, and walk-in, feeding automatically into a single unified front-desk pipeline.
Practice Knowledge Base
Chatref indexes your scheduling rules, FAQs, and clinic policies, verifying every response against your official documents.
Smart Output Routing
Most patients receive instant answers. Complex or clinical requests are routed directly to your office staff.
Answered Instantly
90%+ of operational, policy, and scheduling questions resolved on the spot.
Warm Staff Handoff
Escalated directly to your clinic team with complete patient query transcripts.
Patient questions arrive by phone, web, and walk-in and flow into Chatref, which reads the practice's own content — schedules, policies, FAQs. Most questions get an immediate grounded answer; cases that need a person are handed off warmly with full context.
How it works
From your practice info to a clear answer.
Add your FAQ content once. Chatref learns it, answers prospective clients day and night, routes distress contacts to the right resource, and brings your team in only when a case really needs a person.
Add your practice information Load your specialties, session types, fees, and intake process. Chatref learns them in minutes.
Chatref learns your practice It indexes everything so it can answer any new-client question accurately and consistently from your own content.
Visitors get answers instantly Questions about fees, availability, session format, and specialties resolve on the spot – at any hour, on any day.
Distress and complex cases go to a human Any message signaling distress is immediately routed to the 988 Lifeline or your on-call contact. Chatref never advises – it routes.
The toolkit
Every job, mapped to a feature.
One AI agent, and a toolkit around it. Each card links to the feature that does the work.
More healthcare practices
Explore other sub-industries.
Chatref works the same way across healthcare. See how it fits neighbouring practices.
Real questions
Questions it answers from day one.
Do you offer sliding scale fees?
Are you accepting new clients right now?
Do you see adults or children, or both?
What therapy approaches do your clinicians use?
How do I get started as a new client?
Do you offer telehealth sessions?
What are your office hours?
I'm feeling overwhelmed and need to talk to someone right now
How long is a typical session?
Solutions for mental health practices
Solve every intake job, from first question to first
From after-hours inquiries to multilingual intake, Chatref answers the questions behind each step. Pick the one your practice gets stuck on.
The math
Help that scales with your practice, not your payroll.
Because you only pay for what you use, costs follow real inquiry volume, not seats or staff hours. As your practice grows, Chatref absorbs the repeat fee, specialty, and availability questions, so each coordinator can focus on the clients who truly need a person. Results depend on your practice size and content.
- Fewer missed new-client inquiries after hours
- Faster intake for prospective clients
- Round-the-clock answers, no night staff
- Coordinators freed from routine FAQ questions
Loved by support teams
Mental health practices, capturing more clients without more staff.
How therapy and counseling practices use Chatref to answer intake questions and capture new clients before they reach a competitor.
We were losing at least five new-client calls a week to voicemail during session hours. Chatref captured every inquiry overnight within the first month. Our coordinator now focuses on scheduling, not answering the same fee questions all day.
Prospective clients used to wait until Monday morning for answers. Now they get a response at 11 p.m. on Friday and show up ready to book.
It answers our sliding-scale and specialty questions from our own content, in our voice. New clients can't tell the difference from a real staff member.
of new-client intake questions answered before they reach the front desk
Our Spanish-speaking clients now get the same quality response as everyone else, without us hiring bilingual front-desk staff.
Can a chatbot on my therapy website handle distress messages safely?
Yes – with the right routing setup. Chatref does not provide support or advice to someone in distress. Instead it immediately surfaces the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline number and directs the person to call or text it, or to contact your
Will the chatbot collect protected health information from clients?
Chatref is designed to keep PHI out of the chat entirely. It answers questions about your practice – fees, specialties, availability – and collects basic contact info for lead capture. Clinical history and intake forms stay inside your
How is Chatref different from SimplePractice's built-in messaging?
SimplePractice's secure messaging is for existing clients inside the client portal. Chatref sits on your public website and handles the step before that – anonymous visitors asking basic questions, prospective clients exploring your
Can the chatbot answer questions about my therapist's specialties and fee structure?
Yes. You load that information into Chatref's knowledge base once. The widget then answers specialty, modality, session format, sliding scale, and fee questions accurately and consistently – 24 hours a day – without a staff member needing
Does a therapy practice chatbot work for telehealth-only practices?
Absolutely. Telehealth-only practices often have no front desk at all. The chatbot fields incoming questions, captures new-client interest, and directs visitors to your online scheduling link or intake portal – all without anyone picking
How quickly can I set up Chatref for my practice?
Most practices are live in under an hour. You paste one script tag on your website, load your FAQs and practice info into the knowledge base, configure the crisis-routing action, and go. No developer needed.
Bring Chatref to your mental health services.
Add your help docs, drop in one snippet, and let Chatref answer the first questions – free to start.
Part of the Healthcare support hub · see pricing.