Jack O'Brien: Chris Baxter, a founder of Aeva AI. Chris, you must lament clinic owners who don't go ahead because it costs whatever, 50 bucks here or 500 bucks there, and yet they're missing 15 calls a day.

Chris Baxter: And a lot of the time, it could be just hesitation and being scared to make a change.

Jack O'Brien: Who cares how much it costs? Like, take my money. 15 new clients a week, 15 grand, we're talking $700,000 a year. Do we want to fill our books or do we not? Do you want an extra 700 grand's worth of revenue or do you want to save like 40 or 50 bucks on some phone system? Give me a spell. Sign up and get amongst it and invest in the return. G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode.

Chris Baxter: Four out of five patients, when they call and their calls aren't answered by a clinic, they don't leave a message.

Bec Clare: What more could the admin team do that gets them out of $10 an hour tasks up to $100 and $1,000 an hour tasks?

Chris Baxter: We built an AI receptionist system for a physio clinic, and that's where it all started.

Jack O'Brien: Are you seeing clinics lay off receptionists and mass firings and terminations? That's all of it. What if December and January was your best Christmas period, not your worst? All right, well, welcome back to another episode of the podcast, a bit of a different one for us today. I'm joined by my trusty co-host, Bec, Claire. Bec, welcome. How are you?

Bec Clare: Great. Thank you, Jack. How are you?

Jack O'Brien: Good, good. How have you weathered the Instagram storm of our recent episode with the Curious Physio Project, Ariel?

Bec Clare: Yeah. It's been interesting. Some very fruitful conversations, including fruitful conversations in my own clinic, which has been great.

null: Okay.

Jack O'Brien: Yes. Very good, folks. If you haven't caught that one, go back and listen to a recent episode where we talked about the ethics of healthcare. And again, huge shout out to Ariel. She's been super abundant in my personal conversations with her behind the scenes. So, that was a lot of fun. Good to have you back. We're going to have some fun here today. And also joining us, the great and wonderful Chris Baxter, a founder of Aeva AI. Chris, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Chris Baxter: Thank you, Jack. Excited to be here and ready to spill the sauce on the truth of AI receptionists. It's going to be exciting. Okay.

Bec Clare: Jack, we thought last episode was controversial. Here we go.

Jack O'Brien: Here we go. I mean, we don't intend to be controversial. If that's where we end up, then so be it. We'll embrace it. But we'll have some fun along the way. And clinic owners, you're going to get heaps out of this. And I will say up front, regardless of where you sit on the AI, on the breadth of AI, maybe you're an early adopter, you're ahead of the curve, or maybe you're a bit of a skeptic and a laggard, there'll be something in this for everyone. And I say those terms with great endearment. you'll get plenty out of how we think about these conversations. There'll be certain, you know, tools and topics that we'll touch on, but we're going to have a whole lot of fun along the way. Now, before we dive into the meat and potatoes of this episode, quick little announcement or welcome. We've had a few clinic owners join us on the inside over the last few days. So just a huge shout out to those joining us. Kynan has joined us in Elevate and Weisin has joined us in the Business Academy, literally today. I've got those notifications pinging through. So a huge welcome to you folks. And we've got dozens and dozens joining us next week for our workshop on adding an additional 10 to 20 new clients into your clinic. So hopefully this episode is released before that workshop, but we're going to have a whole lot of fun. There's so much happening around the place, but without further ado, let's talk all things AI. So first of all, Chris, why don't you give us the quick elevator pitch of who you are and how Aeva

Chris Baxter: came to be for sure. So I'm Chris. I actually came from real estate. So five years in real estate, I was on the phones myself, answering phone calls, making phone calls. So that really taught me what it takes to create the perfect phone interaction. And after that, we found AI receptionists and voice AI technology. And that's really what inspired me to find an industry that this was going to make the biggest impact in and help the most. And that's when we built an AI receptionist system for a physio clinic in Auckland. And that's where it all started. So they started telling their friends, it just started sort of compounding from there. And we had a business and we went all in, in the allied health healthcare niche. So Yeah, that's where we come from, Jack.

Jack O'Brien: Happy days. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you embarked upon building an AI software company? What do you wish you knew at the start?

Chris Baxter: So, everything looks easy, right, before you get into it. Of course. I think that the biggest thing that we underestimated was the amount of different little use cases that clinics would need this for and all the little intricacies about every edge case of a call of how it could go. And so actually accounting for all of that and building an AI that is able to handle anything that you throw at it is a challenge. And it's a bigger challenge than we first anticipated.

Bec Clare: Chris, I like that in that isn't all business, when we look at how great businesses run, they look like swans, but the legs are paddling. And I'm just almost imaging like Dan Gibbs here and his swan emoji going across the surface there. But when we look at the people we admire in business, it often looks easy from the outside, except we haven't, like if we get that peak behind the curtain, which I'm excited to chat to you about today, that peak behind the curtain allows us to unpack just how much thinking goes in behind layering these systems and creating an amazing product that people can rely on and trust. And I think that's where the AI bit comes in is how can we trust it? Yes, we can rely on it because tech is going places and it's continuing to evolve. But how can we trust it?

Chris Baxter: Exactly right. And I think that that brings us to another point, which is that when we did first start, we were trying to build it for every industry out there. So we were helping huge sporting teams across Australia and New Zealand to promote their sporting events. And we were doing it for finance. We were doing it for real estate. We were doing it for every industry. And what we realized was to get the absolute best AI receptionist out there for a particular industry, you can only pick one. And you have to go all in on building the best for that industry. And that's why we chose healthcare and focused on that.

Jack O'Brien: I like that. Well, before we unpack all sorts of different philosophies and ideas around Chris, do you want to tell us where people can go? Can they get a trial or how do they set up? Where do they go for Aeva?

Chris Baxter: Yeah, for sure. Jump on to www.aevaai.com. That's spelt A-E-V-A-A-I.com. And that is the best place to book a demo with our team or you can sign up straight away. Do not forget to mention that you found us from the Clinic Mastery podcast here. So just mention Clinic Mastery and I'm sure Jack will add a link to your code as well. You will get a whole month for free when you sign up as well. So definitely use that.

Jack O'Brien: Grateful for Aeva extending that whole month, first month free to users. Please do use our code. We'd super appreciate that. It helps support the podcast. So head over to aevaai.com or the link will be in the show notes. If you're listening to this driving at the gym, at work, whatever the case may be, we'll make sure we link it all up in the show notes. Okay, we've got that out of the way. Let's talk about Why phones and this idea of phone systems, whether it's a human or AI and the nature of missed calls. Chris, I'm curious if you've got any stats or data on how many calls do clinics receive or how many missed calls do clinics have or what number of calls are outside of hours. Just throw some data up because I'm sure we've got some data nerds listening along. So give us some data.

Chris Baxter: Well, four out of five patients when they call and their calls aren't answered by a clinic, they don't leave a message. Messages aren't used at all anymore these days. So most likely what they're going to do is they're going to move on to the next clinic on the list that they're looking to book an appointment with. In terms of what we see for bookings with Aeva, like how many convert to an actual booking, up to 30% of all calls can convert to appointments. And so this is what would have otherwise been missed calls that we see. So that's a massive, massive just capture that you would have usually just been losing to after hours or maybe lunchtime or busy Monday mornings. And so that's a core part of just an instant saving straight away that you're now generating new business.

Jack O'Brien: I mean, we could go down all sorts of stat rabbit holes. Bec, I'm curious at either your clinical clinics that you coach and work with, what's the split do you reckon of new clients who say book themselves online versus those who book themselves over the phone? Do you have any anecdotal or empirical data on that?

Bec Clare: What we've found in a number of clinics sort of in the musk space, a lot of patients are now opting to book online because they can choose their time, they can do it any time of day. Our booking rates for our clinic spike after hours. So people are genuinely wanting to seek care and seek a solution after our traditional open hours. When it comes to the interesting aspect of missed calls, we took a deep dive into this just last week and the number of people calling and not leaving a message. I was blown away by it. And then I looked at my own sort of pattern of behaviour and I wouldn't leave a message anywhere anymore. I might either ring the next place or I'd call back later, but it seemed an inconvenience for me. We did some research last week alone. We just took a very small snapshot. We were missing 10 calls a day where patients were not leaving a voicemail. Now, that's quite a lot. So, you know, over our open hours, that's 55 a week. You're talking about a 30% conversion rate on those, Chris. That's a whole lot of people we haven't been able to care for. Hence why we're jumping on for a trial.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. It's an interesting point though, right? Because even if they did leave a message or didn't, but you captured their number and you're able to call them back. Chris, you can probably answer it. They're probably gone. Like, yeah, you can call them back tomorrow, but they've already booked somewhere else yesterday. Absolutely.

Chris Baxter: In terms of your data question, Jack, a few more points for you. So 40% of bookings come in over the phone still rather than online. So you still got that a big portion, 60% coming in online, but there's still 40%. There's still a massive amount enough to worry about. The other one is that after-hour calls make up for 27% on average of clinic calls that come through. So again, a massive amount.

Jack O'Brien: Why do you think, Chris, maybe hypothesizing a little bit here, why do you think people still like booking over the phone when almost every clinic you can book online? Why do people still call?

Chris Baxter: I think it's mostly two types of patients that would choose the phone call method. It's your new patients, new patients that just need a bit more of reassurance. You know, they've never been to this clinic before. They need a few more questions confirmed first. Or it's your older generation. And that's the generation that, of course, this is primarily for as well. They're the ones still on the phones, booking in using that channel. And so the funny thing is, is when we very first built Aeva, we had to think, right, who's going to be the top user, the older generation. So we have to build this so simple that even the most non-tech savvy patient can call up, speak normally and book an appointment just as they used to. So that was really the goal there.

Bec Clare: Chris, I've got a question just on that. So your older population, they're potentially a population that are not necessarily leaning into AI themselves. How did you build a system and a platform that meant that either they didn't know they were talking to AI or they felt comfortable talking to AI? Because it's probably where, you know, if you're going to have some skepticism around AI, I'm going to make broad sweeping generalization, it's probably that cohort of patients.

Chris Baxter: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, you're always going to get patients that are going to not want to talk to AI, that are going to want to wait and talk to a receptionist instead. And what happens in those scenarios, message is taken, passed on, and someone would come back to them. Now, for most people, we actually find that the older generations are the ones that are the most excited about having just talked to a system, having never experienced an AI system before, and they're the ones raving when they come into the clinic and going, I can't believe it. I just talked to this AI. It completely helped me how I normally would be helped, and I never experienced that before. What is this? So, we actually get the most comments from those older generations.

Jack O'Brien: I'm just thinking out loud and I wonder, it's hard to predict the future and there's probably going to be a lot of social evolutions over time. I wonder if over time the younger cohort, maybe those who are in their teens or early 20s currently, they're going to want to call a clinic that has AI rather than humans. It's almost like they trust AI or they'll get the answer from AI better than they might. They don't like talking to humans, but they're very comfortable talking to the robots. I wonder whether that'll come to fruition.

Chris Baxter: Yeah, true, true. Or you'd be cautious about telling a person about some stuff, but if it's a system and you trust that it's been being handled correctly, then you might trust that a bit more. So, yeah, very true.

Jack O'Brien: Bec, I'm curious, right? Because your background is on the phones. Literally, you help clinics optimize their practice management and all these types of things. How do you think about this human AI world? What are you thinking?

Bec Clare: Yeah. I mean, I actually trained, like one of my high school jobs was doing some telemarketing. So, like my phone skills is what I've relied on this whole time and the ability to communicate. And at first, I remember, Jack, you actually presented on this a little while back in the summer and I was like, this is something our clinic is categorically not adopting. Nope, absolutely not. It's going to take away all these jobs and And then I actually listened to my team and the workflow and the impact that they could have in a different way made me think about it differently. And then in coaching and working in my own clinic, I looked at the consistency at which we're able to deliver scripts and the experience for clients on the phone. And I became really concerned that it is a lot of work to get your admin team performing at a high level consistently and then, hey, You've got to train a new person to do the same thing. And it just felt like I was spending a lot of this time. Now for us, I believe that we'll sit nicely in a hybrid model. And I think that's really where we found it to be a healthy mix, even in clinic.

Jack O'Brien: What do you mean hybrid?

Bec Clare: There'll be still a lot of human interaction and human experience, and we will lean to AI for where we can. leverage our human interaction. So as an example, we're using AI note-taking that allows the clinician to be more connected in the consult. Yes, we'll look at some AI phone answering to allow us to be really present with our clients in the one-on-one interaction that we have at the front desk. So I think it's about how we balance the two. That's, that's the happy place we've come to versus being like AI phone answering across the clinic for every phone call. Who knows, we might get there, but right now we're really happy, happily in this balance.

Jack O'Brien: Chris, do you want to maybe speak to those adoption behaviours? What are some of the ways that clinics can adopt AI, like you can go two feet deep into the deep end or just dip a toe in? How do clinics adopt AI?

Chris Baxter: Yes. I think everyone's at different stages in the AI journey, so it's really important to Well, I'll give you an example. So when we first started this about two and a bit years ago, there were a certain amount of people, you know, all those early adopters who were like, yep, great, let's get started with this. And then there was a massive amount of people that were saying, no, look, we're not quite ready for AI. This is just shifting. So we just get more and more people who two years ago said, no, there's no chance. Now they're going, do you know what? I've thought about it. I've reviewed everything. This actually does make sense for us. And so those people that are starting out with AI, for example, an AI receptionist system, I'd recommend to get your patients and your team comfortable with it first. So that means starting a bit of a pilot run, which is a small, you know, covering the obvious stuff like the after hours, the during lunch breaks, when it's going to go to voicemail anyways, start there and get really comfy with the system, trust it. And as soon as that happens, that's when you can start going, right, well, let's start covering this time as well and give our team a bit more support on these areas. So that would be how I'd recommend to implement it into a clinic.

Bec Clare: That's actually what we really like about what Aeva offer is the fact that we can choose our level of interaction, how deep we go. Um, so being able to go for some of that low hanging fruit, which might be the after hours calls or the overflow calls, or when our biggest pain point, we close for team day. It's a whole day where we don't answer the phone. We come back to. massive amounts of voicemail messages and who knows however many other missed calls of people who haven't been able to reach us. So that's where I sort of think like these are the areas we can just dip our toe in the water a little bit and get comfy and use a system and then be able to answer some of the tricky questions.

Jack O'Brien: Clinic owners, you need to realize that you can dip your toe in the water when you're testing out these softwares and your rollout and your implementation can happen over time. There'd be many of us who would think back to when we transitioned from paper-based notes to cloud-based notes and practice management softwares and it was this massive project and cut over dates and stress and pressure. And it doesn't need to be like that. You can sign up for Aeva and get started and implement it out of hours in busy periods and stage that rollout over time. The same is true if you're transitioning your payment softwares and you're rolling out health, for example, you don't have to chuck the high caps machines in the bin straight away. You can get started with health and over time roll it out. And the same is true in various other domains that What, sometimes we are fearful of change management because of how we've had to manage change previously, but the way you manage change now, particularly as it pertains to new softwares, tools, and AIs is very different and far more palatable from a management and leadership perspective. Chris, where do people go wrong with the rollouts? Where do you see instances you're like, oh, that's going to fail, or I wish they'd do it differently?

Chris Baxter: The biggest one that we see is someone coming into Aeva who's got a very messy setup already. And what I mean by a messy setup is appointment types and their structure of how they currently intake clinics. Feel free to share your thoughts on this, Bec and Jack, but when you have a vision of a new patient going to your website, booking in an appointment, for me, if it was my clinic, I'd want that process to be so simple, so straightforward that it's a new patient's journey is just so easy. They don't need to think. Some clinics, they make that new patient scroll through hundreds of appointment types, trying to work out what to book. And that creates a real barrier. And so if they're starting off with that and then bringing that same broken structure into Aeva, there's going to be a problem. But what we do do is we do work with every single person coming on board. We've got a customer success manager that actually helps to break that down and try and help a little bit with that as well. But yeah, that's definitely a big one for sure.

Jack O'Brien: And so therefore, rolling out new systems is a great opportunity to tidy up your infrastructure and get your house in order. Yeah, Bec, what do you think about that?

Bec Clare: This is a really interesting test case. A few weeks ago, we made a change to our appointment structure in order to accommodate some other technology we were bringing into the clinic. So we created more appointment types. And what we actually saw with online booking was we have about an 11% online booking rate. That dropped to below 4% almost as soon as we made the change. So we tracked it for two or three weeks, and I was looking at our clinic, and I'm like, what? The little world symbol's not coming up anywhere. I can't see these bookings. Something doesn't feel right. So went to the data, had a look, saw it had sort of fallen off a cliff, reversed it back, and within an hour, we were back up. So it does make a huge difference as to what the experience and the journey is like. And if it's clunky now, as Jack said, it's a beautiful time to curate what it looks like. And I think as clinic owners, and I encourage all admin team members to do this, walk through the process that your clients are actually going to go down in order to book. And if there are points of friction or points at which they need to make too many decisions, They're going to fall out of that funnel. They're going to bounce out. And so our bounce out rate just by making that change was enormous, reversed it back, happy days again. But it's meant that we're now ready to do something like Aeva because the system and the process is really clean. It's just such an interesting test case for us.

Jack O'Brien: You know, it comes to mind when you say that, Bex, like how many clinic owners have called their own clinic? Probably none or very few. And, you know, the, one of the things that are super appealing for me about Aeva AI is the consistency and predictability and repeatability. You know, if I was to call a clinic and they only had a human answering the phones or human team, rather, I could get the same person answer me once a week for the next four weeks and have four very different experiences. Based on how they slept that night, or have they had lunch, or what's the time of day, or who did they just speak to, that person will give me four very different experiences. And likewise, if I was to call that clinic and have four different people answer the phone, I'm going to get four very different experiences. That's the nature of humans and variability. Chris, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm not going to get such a variety of experiences when Aeva AI answers my phone. I'm going to get essentially best practice optimized every time. So talk to me about how Aeva learns or evolves or is trained to suit a clinic? How does that work?

Chris Baxter: So, of course, we use AI in every case that we can to assist that process as much as possible. So, you're talking as, you know, it learns from your website, learns from your whole PMS system, and then you are able to customize it to exactly the structure that you'd like. And you can set up that structure, and obviously you can tweak it as much as you'd like over time, but it's going to stick to what you set up. The learning behavior comes in when patients ask questions that the AI might not know the answer to. It'll take note of that, shoot you a message, ask you to update it so it can learn. Now, human memory or, you know, getting a call center, they've got very limited memory of what they can think of for your clinic. AI has almost unlimited. So you can have up to 300 questions and answers of just knowledge that you fill the AI with that's going to last you a long time. It's tricky to fill that up. Good luck to those who try.

Bec Clare: Challenge accepted. Yeah, exactly.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, so you're iterating and learning and giving it feedback. Can you listen or read transcripts or understand and evolve it yourself as a clinic owner?

Chris Baxter: Yeah, absolutely you can. So you can review core recordings, core transcripts, make sure everything's coming through flawlessly. We've even gone as far, Jack, to go, right, if a new patient's called up, they've tried to book an appointment, but they haven't booked. Why haven't they booked and what can we do next time to try and stop that from happening again? We have that data available for clinic owners because it's just so powerful to improve that setup and their flows.

Bec Clare: Chris, I have a really specific question for you, right? around the types of calls that Aeva can handle and if there's an ability to, I guess, curate what it can handle. So, cancellation scripts are one thing that a lot of clinic owners really want to assist their team with and the notion of a reschedule versus a cancellation. Can we train Aeva to almost not take the cancellation? How can we curate that so that that's then dealt with by a human or do you see that Aeva can really enhance that cancellation process or prevent it from happening in the first place.

Chris Baxter: Yeah, sure. So, cancellations are an interesting one. It depends on the clinic size for my recommendation. So, for example, if you were a solo practitioner and you were taking all the calls yourself, you've implemented Aeva, I'd recommend get Aeva to share your cancellation policy and to cancel it as well. The reason being is because if you're a solo practitioner, you don't want to have that interaction one-on-one with your clients saying, hey, Just so you know, you're calling within 24 hours, we charge a cancellation fee. It just, it doesn't sit right. You need a middle person to be sharing that. So that's where the AI is super powerful. It will say that cancellation policy every time and help to stop and to convert those cancellations to reschedules. If you're a larger clinic like yourself, Bec, absolutely, you can turn the cancellation function off and say, look, for cancellations, we'll pass it on to our team. Some will come back to you to confirm and to help you out further. And that can be handled by your team instead.

Bec Clare: Nice, because I think for a lot of clinic owners, they go, how much control do I want to give AI when this is a script we want handled in a really specific way? I mean, we could also train, as you say, the AI to be able to handle that, but it's really nice to know there are elements we can turn on and off.

Chris Baxter: Absolutely. It's all about that comfort level, isn't it, Bec? So just increasing that over time, feeling more confident.

Jack O'Brien: And I think, you know, we need to have a similar mindset to how we train a new team member as to how we train Aeva and AI in our clinics. This isn't just a set and forget, turn it on and, you know, go sip a pina colada by the beach. It's like, no, no, let's work with this. Let's train it. Let's evolve it over time because that's where a real opportunity is. Chris, I'm curious, at what point do clinics hit a peak use? Does it take one or two months or six months to really dial this in? What are you seeing as peak rollout times?

Chris Baxter: I would say after a month. Aeva is fully in swing and helping with whatever the clinic was trying to solve in the first place. So it does take that month of getting some feedback from patients, internal team, or yourself, just making sure you're happy with it, fine-tuning it, and then having it. sort of in the background and working without you. Some of our longer term customers, Jack and Bec, they've been with us for over two years and we don't even hear from them anymore because it's working in the background by itself on autopilot. So that's the aim for everyone that we want to get to, a hands-off system that's always there.

Bec Clare: You might have lost track. No, you're still there.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. I've got a question coming for you, Bec, around like, I'm still here. I'm still here. This is real me, not the AI me. Question for you, Bec, around like what receptionists do moving forward as we continue to roll out some of these AI things. But I'll say that here's a a thought provocation for clinic owners that you must have some AI implementation across your clinic in the next six months or you're going to get left behind or you are going to run out of profitability. Because as costs continue to evolve for the people and the opportunities and efficiencies for AI continue to rise, you must be implementing these things or you will get left behind really, really quickly. So Bec, when you see clinics implement these AIs, what do the team do? Are you seeing clinics lay off receptionists and mass firings and terminations? What are the humans doing?

Bec Clare: No, I see a couple of different things. I see where there might be already an admin shortage, you know, admin team member has moved on, they choose not to refill the role necessarily, or they're trying to find the best person to bring in and there's that window, they're leaning into some AI. Um, the way that most clinics are approaching is that it is another tool that further enhances the client experience, both in interaction on the phone, but then allows the team to be really powerful in the human interaction. And then what more could the admin team do that gets them out of, you know, $10 an hour tasks up to a hundred and a thousand dollar an hour tasks where they know and they live and they breathe what you do as a clinic. Uh, I definitely haven't seen. I don't think any clinic that I've been working with who's adopted AI actually reduce their admin team. It's more around repurpose them to other really meaningful human-centered areas of their work. I also think the team, particularly our team, they've been really excited to adopt some of this stuff because we've been looking at where the workflows are either really clunky, they get frustrated, it doesn't make for an ideal job for them and job satisfaction is low in parts. We go, okay, well, what tech and what AI can we bring in there so that we really enjoy what we do? So I think it's more around leveraging it that way, but there's definitely a fear. When I, when I broached this with my team around AI phone answering, there was a question around, well, what will our function be? Uh, and I think being able to articulate what it looks like for their role is also really important.

Jack O'Brien: Chris, I'll get your perspective on that reduction of headcount or lack thereof. We met up as a leadership team for Clinic Mastery recently and one of our team is going through Harvard Business School doing some master's work through Harvard and one of the key metrics that they're looking at these days is around revenue per headcount. And these tools like Aeva or maybe it's Preve on a clinical side of things or Health on the Finance side of things, these tools enable us to generate more revenue per headcount. And what that means is we're able to remunerate our teams better. We're able to reinvest back into the client experience. We're able to ultimately be more profitable and sustainable for us to build clinics for good for the long term because of the rollout of these tools that enable us to generate more revenue per headcount. Chris, I'm curious, do you see any clinics reducing their headcounts or how are you seeing clinics redeploy their human capital and the human resource, I guess the classic term? Yeah, what are clinics doing with the humans?

Chris Baxter: It's pretty rare for a clinic to Remove a human when i replace an AI and the only scenarios i've really seen that happen is if they already struggling in terms of financially to make sure that that profit comes in so this enables them to do that. But otherwise, it's more in place for clinics who can't actually afford a human team member in the first place, right? And so if you've got yourself picking up the calls, it's that additional support to just assist you to actually have a bit more time for your patients, for your life, and to actually be a real business owner rather than an owner-operator. So I think in terms of making sure that your team is on board with this, the biggest thing that I share is that no, it's not a replacement for people. People can never be replaced. When you walk into a clinic and you have a receptionist smile at you and say, hey, great to see you again. How is your day today? That's not going to be replaced. So, yeah, that's what I'd share with the receptionist teams. And I'd also work out how to make the best patient experience possible within your clinic and focus the energy on that instead, because that's really what you're able to do with systems like that.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I really love that thought. You know, historically, we would say to clinics, and this is a very broad stroke benchmark, but I know clinic owners love a good benchmark. You know, we classically say you might need one FTE reception admin team member for three clinicians. One to three was the classic ratio. And now, it can really be a case of one to five or one to six. And so really what that means is not… I would say, Aeva should increase your headcount. If you're a clinic owner, Aeva should increase your headcount. And what do I mean? I mean, keep your admin team where it is and you can effectively double your clinical team with zero extra admin support. Think of this opportunity to grow our revenue without adding more humans to the team. And that's a great thing because it means we can help more people and it becomes more cost-efficient over time. So Chris, I'm gonna play a little bit of adversarial adversary here. seems expensive. Is it? And I'll answer this question for you. I would say whenever you're a clinic owner thinking X is expensive, things are not independently expensive in an isolated context. Things are only expensive compared to something else or relative to their return or their return on investment. So, I'm answering your question for you. You're welcome to interrupt me here. But I would say, is Aeva expensive? Well, compared to, you know, a $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year salary for one human, Not so expensive after all. Is Aeva expensive? Well, when you consider the ROI of picking up, in your case, Bec, 15 new clients a week, it's probably a drop in the ocean. So Chris, how do you help clinic owners think about the cost or investments or the expense? How do we think?

Chris Baxter: Give us some mental models of how to consider this. So we ran an analysis the other day where we worked out from every single booking Aeva made, comparing the two, so you've got new patient bookings and existing patient bookings, how much has Aeva created in value for all of our clinics who use it? And the answer was $14.5 million. And every single clinic that's on Aeva on average has generated $30,000 worth of appointments through Aeva. And so looking at that as a bit of a return is just amazing. Like the actual amount of Aeva versus what could be created in terms of revenue beyond that. it's above the amount that we charge for every single clinic. So, I mean, if you're missing any calls per month, if you multiply that by 0.3 or 30%, which is the higher bracket of what clinics can achieve on Aeva, and then multiply that by what a patient's worth to you, that's the number that you're missing out on every single month. So yeah, I would say in terms of doing that number for your own clinic, that would be very valuable to work out that number so that you can see how much you could be saving or generating.

Bec Clare: There's so many phone systems out there now and we get this, this question comes up a lot, like so frequently in the Practice Leaders program and with the members that I coach within Clinic Mastery. What phone system's the best system? And it varies wildly. But what I do know is that there are so many phone systems out there that you don't even know how many missed calls are going through to the keeper. They're just getting passed, right? There's no way of tracking that. So it'd be really interesting for those clinic owners who are not able to track that metric, if you jumped on Aeva and then you started to see bookings coming through, that's an indication of potentially how many calls you were missing.

Jack O'Brien: I really like that, Bec. Okay, so here's an interesting mental model for clinic owners to consider. If a client is, quote, worth, in inverted commas, let's say $1,000 lifetime value, this is a round number, and let's say Aeva could – I'm going to pick on Aeva here. This is completely hypothetical, but it's a – not pick in a negative sense, by the way. It's a mental model to think about. If Aeva was able to convert every call into a new client, I'd pay $50 a phone call. And every clinic owner should pay $50 a phone call because that $50 out, $1,000 in. And some people go, oh yeah, but it's a two minute phone call. I should only pay for two minutes. I don't care whether it's a one minute, two minute, 20 minute, one hour call. The point is that we want to invest in results and regardless of like how short or long it takes, right? And so when we think about our investment in Aeva, AI and various softwares and tools that we're using across our clinics, you want to be thinking about the return. And so if, you know, in that example that we've used, maybe it's 15 extra new clients per week picked up, who cares how much it costs? Like, take my money. 15 new clients a week, 15 grand, we're talking $700,000 a year. Folks, stop pinching pennies over $1 here and $10 there. Do we want to fill our books or do we not? Do you want an extra 700 grand's worth of revenue or do you want to save like 40 or 50 bucks on some phone system? Give me a spell. Sign up and get amongst it and invest in the return. Sorry, I just got to get off my chest. Chris, it must not only frustrate you but you must get a little bit, you must lament clinic owners who don't go ahead because it costs whatever 50 bucks here or 500 bucks there. and yet they're missing 15 calls a day? How do you handle the emotion of that when clinics go, oh, we're not going ahead? And you're like, you're doing the meme.

Chris Baxter: You're like, look. It's really interesting. It's trying to understand, well, what is it behind that decision, that mental block? And a lot of the time, it could be just hesitation and being scared to make a change. So that's a big one. The other one is potentially they found cheaper alternatives. And there's a lot of stuff out there at the moment. And what I'd say is if you're looking at a cheaper alternative, try it out. see why it's cheaper. A lot of the time, and probably all the time, it is because the actual voice is poor quality, the AI behind it is poor quality, maybe the whole system behind it is very new and not well tested. So, is that worth costing new patients and return patients booking appointments? Probably not. So, yeah, absolutely, Jack. I agree.

Bec Clare: Chris, I think you make a good point. There are so many options out there for almost every piece of tech now that it can be quite overwhelming as a business owner. And that's what's been really powerful about, say, the Clinic Mastery community and our partners and us being able to curate, thanks to Jack, a lot of the partners that we work with to find the very best for the people that we work with. But also in saying that, It's so quick and simple now to jump between the platforms that just because you sign up to one doesn't mean you are committed for life. And in fact, if a platform is asking you to make that long-term commitment, given how rapidly tech is moving, I'd be somewhat cautious. But why not have the free trial over there? Why not try this one and then work out which one is actually going to suit and work out what the ROI is and why something might have a different price point because it has different features and benefits. You know, it's that classic drawing of the horse is, oh, can you make it cheaper? Yeah, well, you can, but you're going to get a pretty pared back horse.

Chris Baxter: Yeah. You won't get the new patients that you could, right? And that's the trade-off.

Jack O'Brien: That's a great segue, Nick. Thank you. Tech moves rapidly. So where is Aeva moving to, Chris? What's coming down the pipes? What can we get excited about? Give us something that maybe you haven't heard on a podcast elsewhere. Spill the tea.

Chris Baxter: Okay. I'll give you some new gossip that's going around that you might not have heard anywhere else. So we are trying to build the first point of contact for clinics and make sure that we've got the very best in every single category of what those first point of contacts could be. So right now we've got the inbound phone calls, we've got the website support as well, the website chat. We've also got outbound calls, so generating new customers, a whole day of patients if a practitioner is sick and helping to reschedule those. But what we're also working on are two extra things. And the first one is SMS. So you can have two-way SMS with the AI as well. And that's an additional channel that some clinics do use and find very valuable, especially for things like confirmation of appointments. pre-appointment reminders. The next one is the email side of things. So that's another channel that's going to be a part of Aeva. And it's kind of the final piece of the puzzle, which brings that 360 first point of contact support for clinics. And yeah, as I mentioned, the whole ethos of Aeva is to be the very best of that support for you.

Jack O'Brien: And yet, that's why we're backing Aeva. Aeva's our number one when it comes to phone reception and AOI. We're huge fans. And so, clinic owners, if you're on the fence or you're thinking about it, just trust me. Trust us. We've vetted them all. Just get amongst Aeva. Head to aevaai.com. Make sure you mention Clinic Mastery. Use our link. Use our code. It helps support the podcast, but we're backing Aeva all the way in. Oh, just on something you said there, Chris. Bec, I watched your eyes. Folks, if you're not watching the podcast, Come and join us on YouTube. But I watched your eyes and Chris just said, Aeva can call a list for sick days. You know, a practitioner sends you the dreaded text message at 6 a.m. Oh, I've got the lurgie today. I've got gastro. I can't come in. And often, Bec, that probably falls to you to call the first half a dozen patients.

Bec Clare: Yeah. Well, it falls to our health manager, Emma, who would be killing for a sleep in right now because we have had a rough winter. Boy, it has been. So when you said that, I was like, ooh, okay. Yep. All right. I'm interested. Cause that like, if you think about as well, the job satisfaction for your admin team, they are, they're not great calls to make. You walk into the clinic and you start your day rescheduling a whole diary.

Jack O'Brien: No fun. Hi, Mary. Sorry, can't help you today. It's literally the call. Hi, Mary. Sorry, we are unable to help you. It's horrible. So Aeva can handle that. Chris, I'm curious. What else surprises people about Aeva? And when I say that, I'm thinking about, I didn't know there was different voices. I did a live demo of Aeva at our Clinic Mastery Summit, I think the last two years actually, but there's different voices. I wonder how many people call up and don't even realize they're talking to a robot. They think they're talking to Sophie the human or whatever the case is. What surprised you about Aeva?

Chris Baxter: Look, it would be easy to, I guess you could say, fool patients by making it seem like just a real person. It raises a good point, Jack, because we recommend never doing that. We've actually tested both ways, right? Should we kind of make it seem like a person or should we be really upfront and share that it's AI. And almost every single time, being upfront, sharing that it's AI works so much better. And I think the main reason for that is because people's expectations, when they understand this is a system, not a human that they're talking to, they want to skip the small talk. They want to skip any back and forth. They want to get from A to Z as fast as possible. So I think that's really, really important there.

Jack O'Brien: surprises people. When people get on the inside, they're like, I didn't realize it could do this.

Chris Baxter: That's really nice that there's that feature. I get messages all the time from clinic owners who are using Aeva, and they are just absolutely amazed by how emotionally intelligent it is. And I'll give you an example. So someone had an appointment that day. Unfortunately, they found out they had a heart condition and they had to focus on that and actually cancel the next two upcoming appointments. Aeva was so emotionally intelligent that it actually shared that it was extremely sorry to hear that. They should definitely focus on that heart issue and go see whoever they need to see for that first. handle that situation well. The second one was someone got robbed and they couldn't come anymore. They said, look, I've become robbed and I won't be able to make the appointment. And again, Aeva was very intelligent, shared, look, you should probably contact the police, do these steps and look, we'll be here when you need us and when that's all sorted. That's been really, really interesting to hear all those stories.

Jack O'Brien: That's interesting. I like that. I'm going to put Chris on the spot here, folks. Chris, you've got a chance here now, you've got an audience of thousands to do a little bit of market research. So I'm curious, what are some of the tickets in your dev queue that you're not sure if we should build this feature or not? And you need clinics to upvote or downvote some feature ideas. What are some feature ideas you're contemplating that you need a bit of feedback on?

Chris Baxter: There's two that come to mind straight away. The first one is WhatsApp. Do clinics use WhatsApp channel? How many? Jump into the comments. Where should they share that, Jack?

Jack O'Brien: Yes. Spotify comments is the place to go. Spotify comments.

Chris Baxter: Yeah, amazing. So that's definitely a big one. The other one, so outbound. So this is when you've got meta ads going, you've got a lead form on meta ads that is collecting a phone number. Having Aeva call that phone number, book in that patient and do it straight away so that they're still hot. How many people would find that valuable and should we build that into Aeva as well? That'd be very useful.

Bec Clare: Yeah, the answer is yes.

Jack O'Brien: We'll see if we can get some votes. Yeah, amazing.

Bec Clare: Chris and Jack, I just sent to my two team members who manage Sickleave calls, you're not going to believe this, Aeva can help us with our Sickleave calls. Reaction, numerous exploding head emojis. I think they're happy to be getting a sleep in.

Chris Baxter: How good is that? Are there any more use cases that you can think of, by the way, in your clinic that would be really useful?

Bec Clare: Absolutely. I think there are certain appointment types that we use that the client has to confirm those appointments, few and far between, but there are some. And sometimes they don't text back yes. And so our team need to get on the phone and make sure that they're confirmed, but some slip through the cracks. It'd be lovely to have that as an outbound option. Um, be lovely to have maybe some welcome calls as an outbound option, trying to enthuse people, um, particularly based on appointment types. That would be, I, I'm just thinking of all the use cases where I'm like, oh, we just don't have time within our admin team. It's not a lack of skill, it's a lack of time for them to do those things and do them really well and consistently. And, oh, the ideas are coming.

Chris Baxter: Could you give me an example of how like a welcome call would go, how you'd vision, envision that?

Bec Clare: So, perhaps someone books online or they're referred from an external party and we call Jack as the patient. Like, hi Jack, it's Ek here from PhysioWest. We just want to welcome you to the clinic. Here's some of the things that you can expect to receive. Here's how to get ready for your appointment. We do that all by email, but the number of patients who don't read an email, because they get so many, would be a really nice point of difference.

Chris Baxter: I absolutely love that. You know what? No one's ever come up with that idea before. I've never heard that before, but that is a fantastic type of call. Yeah, I love that idea.

Bec Clare: Happy to work together, Chris.

Chris Baxter: Let's do it. Sounds great.

Bec Clare: Segway Jack, I think you can jump off the podcast now. Chris and I are just going to.

Jack O'Brien: Happy to be the audience here. Yeah, super interesting. I mean, there's so many use cases and yeah, I just want to publicly acknowledge you. You know, you're such a wonderful adopter and you've rolled these out in such a wonderful way across your team and such wonderful feedback to all the partners that we work with. I love hearing your energy and PhysioWest's adoption. Thank you. Chris, we're coming to the end here. I think we've whet people's appetites enough. I'll ask a very specific question, Chris. There were some clinic owners who were sitting back going, you know what? I think I might jump in on Aeva, but I'll do it in January. What's your encouragement to them? How are you covering Christmas?

Chris Baxter: Are you expecting any missed calls before now and the New Year's? It's obviously worth stepping in. You've got a month, a whole month for free. So you may as well give it a go and make sure it's a good fit for you.

Jack O'Brien: Spot on. Yeah, I would double click and second that for sure. Use November for your free month to set it up, dial it in. Like Chris said, it's optimized after a couple of weeks and then you head into December and January. Folks, clinic owners, I know so many of you are nervous and stressed about December and January. You don't need to be as nervous and stressed when you can roll out Aeva for your clinic now and head through December and January. What if December and January was your best Christmas period, not your worst? Here is how to fix it. Get started. Get amongst it. worry about the excuses later. So head to aevaai.com. That's a-e-v-a-a-i.com. Please mention Clinic Mastery. Use the link in the show notes. Use the code. Help support the podcast. Chris, this has been fun. Let's do it again. Absolutely. I appreciate it, guys. Excited. Yeah. Well, next episode, Bec, if it's going well, you can let us know. If it's not, we'll talk about something else. No, I cannot see a world where it doesn't go well. I'm excited to hear – maybe this is like a real life case study as we roll it out in real time. Super. Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you, everyone, for the partner with you all. Thank you again, Bec, and looking forward to another episode soon. Bye for now.

Chris Baxter: Bye-bye.

Jack O'Brien: Thanks, team.