Patient Chat

Patient Chat covers two surfaces under one staff inbox:

• Web Chat — a floating chat button on your booking page (and optionally the rest of your website). Visitors can message you anonymously without booking, and identified patients are matched to their record in your practice system automatically. Available on every plan.
• SMS Chat — outbound SMS conversations you start with a patient from the staff dashboard, plus inbound replies that aren't an automated reminder/recall response. Part of the Reminders & Recalls module — only practices with reminders configured will see SMS threads in the inbox.

Both appear in the same Chat tab on the staff dashboard.

This guide covers setup. For day-to-day use of the Chat tab — reading and replying to messages, verifying visitors, archiving conversations — see the Staff Dashboard guide.

It's organised in three parts:

• Part 1: Admin setup — one-time configuration
• Part 2: What patients see — so you can explain the experience
• Part 3: Front-desk workstation setup — install the dashboard as an app so new-message alerts are reliable

Part 1: Admin setup

Enabling Web Chat

In your admin settings you'll find a Patient Chat section with a Web Chat toggle. Turn it on and the chat button appears on your booking page automatically. If patients only ever use chat from the booking page, no further setup is needed.

Putting chat on your whole website (optional)

To show the chat button on every page of your website — not just the booking page — turn on Web Chat first, then use the "Want chat on your whole website?" panel that appears beneath it. Post this snippet into your site's HTML header section (replace yourpractice with your practice's subdomain):

<script src="https://yourbooking.au/ybchat.js"
        data-tenant="yourpractice" async></script>

Then turn on the Embed script installed toggle in that panel. If the snippet is live on your site but the toggle is left off, visitors on your booking page will see two chat buttons (the booking-page one and your site-wide one) — harmless, but untidy. Turning it on tells the booking-page widget to step aside so only your site-wide button shows.

Enabling SMS Chat

SMS Chat runs on the Reminders & Recalls SMS infrastructure. Its toggle sits in the same Patient Chat section of your admin Settings, next to Web Chat. Two prerequisites:

• Reminders & Recalls is enabled and configured
• The SMS Chat toggle is on

If Reminders & Recalls isn't enabled for your practice, the SMS Chat card shows how to turn that on instead of a toggle.

With both in place:

• Patients replying to a reminder or recall with anything other than Y/N land as an SMS thread in the Chat inbox
• Staff can start an outbound SMS to any patient from the Chat tab

Email notifications

The practice email (configured in admin) receives:

• One email per inbound chat message when no staff dashboard is currently open. Skipped entirely while at least one workstation is connected.
• An archive transcript email when a chat closes — always, regardless of whether staff were online. This gives you a record you can search by patient later, alongside the Patient Note written to the patient's record.

A rate limit caps the per-message email at one per 5 minutes per sender, so a chatty visitor can't flood your inbox.

Part 2: What patients see

Web Chat: visitor experience

A small chat button appears bottom-right of your booking page (or every page of your website, if you've installed the site-wide snippet). It uses your practice colours and font.

The header line shows one of two states:

• "Online — usually replies in minutes" — at least one staff dashboard is open and the Available/Away toggle is on Available.
• "Not monitored right now — leave a message and we'll reply" — no dashboard is open, or the front desk has set Away.

Either way the visitor can type a message; in the offline state they're told to expect a delayed reply.

Anonymous by default. The visitor sees "Chatting anonymously" and can start chatting without giving any details. If they later identify themselves — by booking through the booking flow in the same browser, or by filling in the details form when staff request it — the panel shows "Chatting as: [Name]".

Attention indicator. When a staff reply lands while the panel is closed, the floating button signals an unread message with a colour change and a repeating animation.

On mobile, the panel takes over the full screen in either orientation, with the composer anchored at the bottom above the mobile browser chrome.

SMS Chat: patient experience

There's nothing patient-facing to build or explain — patients send and receive SMS from their phone as normal, from the same number that sends your reminders and recalls. Three things to know:

• STOP inside a chat is just text. Once a patient is in an active SMS chat with you, the word "stop" in their reply isn't treated as a marketing opt-out — a staff-started conversation is transactional ("stop by the front desk on your way out"). The marketing opt-out only fires when STOP arrives via a reminder, recall, or feedback reply.
• Free-text replies to reminders (e.g. "Can I move my appointment?") land in the Chat inbox tagged "Reminder reply", with the appointment context attached.
• Cold/unsolicited SMS — if a patient texts your practice number out of the blue (no reminder, recall, or feedback request in the last three days), it currently doesn't appear in the Chat inbox; the message arrives at the practice email as an unmatched-reply notification. Inbox support for cold inbound will be added later, for practices with a dedicated virtual number.

Part 3: Front-desk workstation setup

Patient Chat is at its best when the dashboard is always running on the front-desk PC, ready to alert staff the moment a message arrives. Set this up once per workstation.

Install the dashboard as an app (recommended)

The staff dashboard installs as a desktop app via Chrome or Edge. Installing it gives you:

• A standalone window with no browser address bar or tab clutter
• A Windows taskbar icon (or macOS Dock icon) that shows an unread-message badge when chats are waiting
• The option to launch automatically when you sign in, so the dashboard is ready the moment the front-desk PC boots

To install (Chrome or Edge on Windows):

1. Open the staff dashboard in Chrome or Edge.
2. Click the install icon in the address bar (it looks like a small monitor with a down arrow), or use the browser menu → Install YourBooking — Staff…
3. Confirm the install.

To launch automatically on Windows sign-in:

• Edge: during the install prompt, tick "Start app when you sign in to your device". If you missed it, open the app, click the … menu in the title bar, choose App settings, and enable "Start app when you sign in".
• Chrome: press Win + R, type shell:startup, and press Enter. Drop a copy of the "YourBooking — Staff" shortcut from your Start menu into that folder; it'll launch on next sign-in.

Sign in once. The dashboard remembers the staff login across restarts, so the auto-launched window is ready to use immediately.

Turn on alerts

So staff are alerted to new chats even when they're not looking at the Chat tab, enable these once per workstation:

• Desktop notifications — the first time you load the dashboard, the browser asks whether to show notifications; click Allow (works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari on macOS).
• Unread badge — comes automatically once the dashboard is installed as an app (above).
• Chime — on by default; staff can mute or test it from the Chat tab.

With all three on and auto-launch enabled, the dashboard runs as a quiet always-on side window that flags new chats even after a reboot. How these alerts look and behave day to day is covered in the Staff Dashboard guide.

What's saved where

Your Booking deliberately keeps as little patient data as possible:

• Live conversations — message bodies live in Your Booking only until the thread closes, then move to the patient's record as a Patient Note and are deleted from us.
• Anonymous visitor sessions — no patient details at all until the visitor identifies.
• Closed-thread record — a small note that "a chat happened with patient X on date Y, N messages" is kept for billing and reporting. No message text.

To find a past conversation, open the patient in your practice system — the transcript is there as a Patient Note dated to when the chat closed.

Limitations

• No file or image attachments in chat yet.
• One sender identity — the visitor sees "the practice" as the sender, not the individual staff member who replied.
• No cold-inbound SMS in the inbox — see Part 2 for details and the conditions under which this will be added later.

Troubleshooting

Visitors say they can't see the chat button.

• Check that Web Chat is enabled in your admin panel.
• Hard refresh the page (Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-R) — the script may be cached.
• If you've installed the site-wide embed snippet, confirm the script tag is in the page source.

The widget shows "Not monitored right now" but I'm at the dashboard.

• Check the Available/Away toggle on the Chat tab — it may be set to Away.
• Confirm the dashboard is fully loaded, then try a hard refresh.

A patient identified themselves but the system says no match.

• Confirm the surname and date of birth are spelled exactly as in your records.
• A different given name is fine (it's used as a tiebreaker, not the primary lookup), but surname + date of birth must match exactly.
• Single-word names can't be matched — a surname is required.