App for counsellors and therapists

Do you provide a counselling, wellness, fitness or therapy service?
Do you usually sell packages that consist of multiple visits?
We have an app for you!

Subscription-based services are a type of business where the sold service cannot be completed in a single visit. This is of course quite self evident. Whether we talk about physical or psychological therapy, mentoring or training, to get any kind of the result, requires time, patience, persistence - over a longer time span.

Let me tell you about the app we built for subscription service providers.

Users

• Therapist/counsellor - the person who is works with the client, rendering the service. Usually holds a license for the type of work.
• Manager, oversee multiple workers, typically a senior, who provides feedback and guidance.
• Assistant, in charge of client scheduling, visit preparation, and handles various administrative tasks like billing.
• Owner - for smaller business all of the above and then some more.

User needs

Let's look at the areas that require the attention of owners and employees in a Therapy business.

Client retention and managing expectations

My barber appointment has an alert set for the day before, as it is was too late when i saw the notification 15minutes before. Better, still I’ve missed the appointment multiple times.

How can an app help? We can send a meeting request to the clients calendar, with one (or multiple:) reminders. But, we should also send a sms the day before. I have seen business owners manually sending sms notifications… Yep that is a pain in the behind to do every day. But it was worth the pain for the owner. Thankfully it is very easy to automate.

Can we keep the client engaged between visits? Now this is quite an interesting topic, and usually we do find some interesting “homework” we can give our client. Coming up with exercises for the time in-between visits has numerous benefits. First of all it will improve the service results. There is only so much we can do in the visits and there will be also a time after the visits, so encouraging a good habit for the client is often the key. Next it will keep the client engaged and less likely to abandon the visits (therapy). Results take time, we need to support the client to stick to the plan. And we might use the “homework completion” as free marketing - eg ask the client to post a selfie on your social networks working out/studying/ etc. Whatever your strategy is, we can help automating it. Even something as simple sending simple to the point in-between motivational emails can dramatically improve client retention. But we can go much further. Building a separate app for clients, with a homework tasks, schedule, reminders and a way to record results.

Scheduling

For sure we are all familiar with scheduling conflicts. Whether we planned a client visit and we already have a personal appointment. Or we overbooked a meeting room. Or we need some equipment that is already booked by somebody else. Or the car we booked for client-on-site visit has scheduled maintenance. How can an application help with scheduling conflicts? There are two steps to the solution. First recording what human or other resource are up to. And second to combine the calendars of all resources in a single view - so you can quickly see whether you have time, there is a therapy room available and the required tools are not in use. We don’t expect you to keep your personal schedule in your business app, and maybe you already have an exchange calendar for your equipment. Our app can do both - read exchange calendars and create an event subscription that you can add to your personal(phone) calendar. If you need to check multiple apps and/or call people, there is now way to plan without stress and with any confidence, things won't go wrong.

Consistent service

There are many reasons why delivering a consistent service is a complex job. First every client is unique, obviously. The service spans across multiple visits that have to fit together a create a meaningful whole. In real life a counsellors might need to substitute for one and other. And of course each counsellor has their unique style.

It makes no sense to search for the silver-bullet, there is none. Actually what we want is a little conflicting, that is to keep the personal unique style of each worker and to provide standardised services. The key here is balance, and the solution is actually building a flow that allows you to find what the right balance is for your situation. And then keep improving and adapting it. There is sadly no way around at least some “paperwork”. But again we need to find the right balance of how many question we want to ask.

It is worth remembering why we ask the questions in the first place - and that is to ensure we offer the right service for each client situation. And once selected, that we are moving towards the promised goal. It is therefore best to actually write down the client journey, with start criteria, milestones along the way and goals. Now this can be as extensive or as brief as your services required, but even a single sentence for each is valuable.

At the minimum, we want to collect information at the start, so called intake-form. Why the client came to us, and their overall pertinent situation. Here the client-journey will help us assess which approach makes the most sense. Next we want to record what was the purpose and outcome of each visit. Again armed with the journey milestones, we have a measure to compare against. And it also helps to keep the client engaged as the progress can be visualised. Finally a completion-form after the last visit. Here is a great place to give feedback to the journey - for example what criteria have to be added to the initial evaluation, or which actions during the visits made the biggest contributions toward achieving the goal.

If at all possible, we strongly recommend collecting client feedback at each step, whether as part of the conversation with the counsellor or as a separate questionnaire sent or given to the client.

With all the data collected you as the owner can sit down and write the proper standard therapy plan right? Well it is one option. There are also other methods that achieve similar or better results, especially if you have senior experienced colleagues, without the heavy top-down approach. First the intervision - regular feedback sessions between pairs of counsellors. Then supervision, which is for junior-senior pair of colleagues, where a senior colleague joins a visits, observes and gives feedback at the end. Finally regular group feedback session are a great way to discuss and discover what works, allows for juniors to learn and builds a cohesive team.

The advantage of our app and working with us, is that all of the data collection can be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. We find it troubling and honestly contraproductive that software is perceived as more mature and capable the more fields and screens and buttons you have to fight through. We know your job is not to be a paperpusher and we shall help you slash and automate and simplify until there is not one click that is not needed. After all as einstein observed a century ago, perfection is not when there isnt anything to add, but when there is nothing to remove.

Billing

Multiple visits present a interesting challenge for billing. First, it is crucial to keep track of completed visits. It is quite common to allow a free reschedule of a visit under some circumstance, for example if requested 24h in advance. On the other hand you might want to charge a no-show. Then there are visits where a substitute therapist/counsellor is attending. Here again we have to make sure the visit is marked as completed.
To make things easy for clients, as a rule you’ll want to offer several pre-paid packages of different lengths for your clients and discounts for repeated customers. Finally these days you have a wide variety of payments methods. Thankfully there are many providers that will process most electronic payments, from credit-cards to applepay, googlepay, etc and we offer prebuilt or custom-built integration as part of the app.

With our app you can create all the product packages with the therapy length and type combination you need. Additionally, visits will be tracked against the purchased package and an automatic sequence number is generated for each visit. The number makes it obvious if the visit is the last in the package. Whats more you can also tie a visit-plan to the visit number, which allows you to have a separate set of tasks associated with the initial visit, the second, the fifth or the last visit.

Our app has builtin support for direct sepa payments via a QR code, saving you a couple of percent on each payment compared to credit cards.

Last, but not least the app offers full customer management with accounts, contacts, assets, quotes and even proper invoices.

Legal & compliance

Personal data requires careful handling. GDPR and US equivalents, make it mandatory to encrypt all data in transit and at rest (stored). On top of that each piece of data has to have a valid and documented reason to be collected in your database and a valid and documented reason to be accessed by company employees.

Apart from legal mandates it is good practice to limit data access to need to know. Thankfully our app is gdpr compliant, and we will help you setup rules for data access and retention. Striking the right balance between instant data access and dependable data security.

Technology puzzle

We already covered many parts of how our app can help: notifications, scheduling, forms, document management, sales & billing. There is another area, that is very important.

Looking back at the few past projects, everyone had more than 2 (up to 7) different types of integrations with other services. An app that is not integrated with other services is just not useful. The days that apps lived in isolated silos are thankfully long gone. The ability to talk to other apps and systems is a pretty much assumed.

One recent example of a client app had these integrations:

• Azure AD (entra) for authentication
• Microsoft Exchange for group calendar events
• Microsoft sharepoint for client-related documents
• MongoDB for external consultant lookup
• Postgres for medical insurance lookup

The first three are available out of the box, with straightforward but powerful configuration options. For example sharepoint folders can be connected with clients, thus you can upload photos and documents to sharepoint straight from the client card in the app.

The last two, were custom implementations.

The truth is there is no universal connector and some configuration or custom code will be almost always needed. At the same time an unconnected app is just not that useful. This is a fact of life, and we are prepared to build all the connections feasible. Because we understand the value of an interconnected system is many times that of the components. And we just plainly hate to copy&paste between systems.

Wrap

Focusing on the client work with is the core of any service offering. Sorry for being captain obvious here.
But, why is it that we accept spending 40% of our time on paperwork or bureaucracy?

Software just makes it too easy to add one more form, field or screen. Resist the temptation and start with the goals, then work backwards to figure out what data we need. Collecting everything will lead to frustrated users, wasted time, and low quality data that is useless.

We, the app providers, are also to blame here. By selling/showcasing our apps with all the bells and whistles turned on. Truth is, you ever going to use 20% of the features, but each customer and each employee will use a different 20%.
Sadly, the results is that all features stay turned-on, again leading to wasted time, errors, frustration and poor user addoption.

One more button? - Just say no.

In order to keep the client in focus, the technology has to play the supporting role, staying in the background, but ready for action.

What is your experience?