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Episode 3
MARBL: How AI & WhatsApp can increase your bookings
In episode three of the Pabau podcast, Alex and Shirin discuss:
Shirin: “So essentially how MARBL works is it’s an AI assistant that can either be a co-pilot to your front desk or it can do the job of the front desk. So it’s either via live chat or ideally WhatsApp communicating with your customers 24/7 in any language.
It can respond to any queries about your treatments and knows all of the answers about your treatments and it can really handle the entire booking journey. And the reason we’re building this is really to solve a couple of pain points.”
Shirin: “Humans only work 9 to 5. So we see that 40% of the leads are actually coming in outside of the business hours. So that’s already 40% of the leads that whoever is fielding those calls can’t answer at the time.
“And then there are all sorts of other issues around inefficiency, like when someone calls and you have to find an appointment and you’re manually going back and forth. It’s a lot of friction to the end customer.”
A lot of the med spots that we’re working with have quite complicated treatment menus. Not everybody knows what polynucleotides are, right? Hiring the right person is expensive and time consuming, then training them on all of your treatments and retaining them can be quite a challenge for many sponsors.
“With an AI concierge, it’s instantly trained on all of your treatments. It knows the pre care and aftercare side of it, it’s 24/7 and it’ll stay with your practice indefinitely.
Shirin: “We went with WhatsApp is because we want to meet customers where they already are, right? Everyone uses WhatsApp. That’s what you’re messaging your friends, your family. People still pay attention to WhatsApp.
“When people get an email these days or when they get an SMS, the reality is just that most people don’t have good conversion on those channels. People don’t pay attention to anymore, but they do pay attention to WhatsApp. And so we just wanted to make it super convenient for the customer.”
Shirin: “People mostly have questions such as: what is this treatment, what time can I go, what practitioner, how much is that?’ It can field all of those inquiries. But then there are certain cases [that are more complex]. For those cases, we’ve established guardrails where a conversation would get escalated for a person to handle it.
“That might be if someone has a complex medical case. We have a whole list of other things that we wouldn’t feel comfortable for an aide to handle, but that would always get escalated. It’s about determining together with the med spa, who is the right person to then handle that inquiry? Is that someone at the front desk? Is it the owner? Is that the practitioner? And then that person will get notified to handle that case.
“But it’s still a much reduced workload.”
Shirin: “People often picture something robotic [when we talk about AI] because they haven’t seen it in action yet. When you see the level of conversations that it can handle and how nuanced the responses are, it feels human.
“It’s also quick on the correct replies, right? People wonder, How did you type that so fast? That’s where they’re really impressed. A lot of the time don’t think the end customer really realizes that they’re speaking to an AI.
“It’s a very different experience from these kinds of bots that you can put on your website.”
Shirin: “One thing we didn’t discuss is the AI’s personality, which you can define. It’s quite cool because you can customize it. For example, you could name it Abby and specify that it should be polite, funny, and friendly. We’ve had clients, especially in weight loss clinics, ask if they can tailor the AI’s personality to better suit their needs.
“Larger clinics may want a more formal and professional tone for their front desk staff, while solo practitioners might prefer a more informal tone with emojis and humor. This customization is possible. The goal is to make the AI as human-like as possible, while aligning it with your clinic’s preferred tone.”
Alex is Pabau’s Product Marketing Manager. He’s worked at Pabau for three years and is passionate about supporting clients in getting as much value as possible from Pabau.
Shirin Krall is the founder of MARBL, an AI-powered concierge service that improves client communication and streamlines bookings for MedSpas.
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