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Intake playbook: med spa.

Injectables, laser, body contouring, IV, hormone. Med spa intake is a consult-to-treatment funnel with a deposit problem, a no-show problem, and a front-desk culture that doesn't always love automation.

Med spa intake looks easy from the outside — high ticket, mostly cash, repeat clients, beautiful brands. The reality is messier. The front desk is doing five jobs at once, the consult-to-treatment conversion is the actual revenue lever, and the no-show rate on $400+ appointments can erase a week of margin if it gets out of hand.

The other complication: med spa clients lean toward boutique experiences. A clumsy automated text feels off-brand in a way it doesn't for a roofing company. Anything we install has to read like your front desk wrote it — same tone, same warmth, same use of the client's first name. We tune harder for voice on this vertical than almost any other.

Last consideration: regulated language. Botox plans, Dysport, filler unit pricing, laser pre/post instructions — there's a list of things the automated agent should not say without supervision. We map the regulated topics on day one and route any inbound question that touches them to a licensed injector or the front desk.

The leak

The intake problem in med spa.

Three leaks dominate the med spa funnel. First, the consult booking gap. Roughly 40–60% of inquiries to a med spa never convert to a booked consult. The lead Instagram-DMs you, you reply six hours later, they've moved on. Speed to first touch is decisive.

Second, the consult-to-treatment drop-off. Even after a consult is booked, no-show rates on med spa consults typically run 15–30% if no deposit is collected. The consult is the highest-leverage 30 minutes of the funnel; losing one is losing the entire downstream LTV.

Third, the post-consult silence. A lead comes in for Botox 30 units, you quote them a treatment plan over $1,200, they leave to 'think about it,' and nobody follows up. Most med spas have a graveyard of these in their CRM. They're almost all reactivatable.

The dollar number

What the leak looks like in dollars.

Quick math on a mid-size med spa. 200 inquiries a month across Instagram DMs, web form, missed calls, and walk-ins. Average consult-to-treatment value of $850 (mix of Botox starter packages, filler half-syringes, a few laser series, occasional body contouring). Current consult booking rate of 50%, current consult-to-treatment conversion of 60%. That's roughly $51,000/mo of booked treatment from this funnel.

Plug in a 20% lift in consult bookings (from faster response and after-hours coverage) and a 15% lift in show-rate (from deposit collection and AI confirmation flows). The recovered revenue lands around $14,000–$18,000/mo for most installs of this size. The Money Machine tier typically pays back inside the first two months.

Higher-volume med spas (500+ inquiries/mo) see proportionally larger numbers, plus a meaningful lift from reactivation of cold-lead lists that nobody has touched in 18 months.

Default stack

What we'd install on day one.

The default med spa stack. Real tools, real roles. Substitutions per business.

Tool / layer
What it does for this vertical
Missed-call text-back (warm tone)
Fires in under 15 seconds with a personalized, on-brand text. 'Hey [name], so sorry we missed you — want to grab a quick consult or just have a question?'
AI chat on Instagram DM + web
Most med spa leads come in through Instagram. The AI replies in your voice, qualifies treatment interest, and books the consult.
Deposit collection at booking
Refundable $50–$100 deposit at consult booking. Drops no-show rate by 30–50% in our typical installs.
Vagaro / Mindbody / Boulevard integration
Consults push into your existing scheduler with the right service, room, and provider. Nobody re-keys.
Pre-consult intake flow
24 hours before the consult, the AI sends the intake form, treatment history, and any pre-care instructions. Show-rate improves, consult time shortens.
Post-consult follow-up sequence
Day 1, 3, and 7 after a consult that didn't close. Tuned per treatment type, with the lead's quoted plan referenced specifically.
Review automation (Google + Yelp)
Fires 24–48 hours after a treatment. Booked-treatment reviews are the primary driver of new traffic for most med spas.
Cold-lead reactivation
Quarterly campaign across the 90-day-cold leads in your CRM. Usually finds 5–12% who are ready to book again.

Med spas with a strong front-desk culture sometimes resist automation philosophically. We design around that: SIS for inquiries that hit you between 6pm and 9am, for Instagram DMs that pile up while you're with a client, and for the consult-to-deposit step that your front desk hates doing. The front desk keeps the relational work; SIS handles the operational tail.

Substitutions: Boulevard is the cleanest integration if you're using it; Vagaro and Mindbody both work but require more careful service-to-SKU mapping. If you're on Square Appointments or a generic Calendly setup, expect a longer setup window for the booking layer.

Day one execution

The steps we run on day one.

Not a 60-day SOW. The actual sequence we work through in the first 5–10 business days for a med spa install.

  1. Day 0 / Walkthrough

    Audit Instagram DMs and the consult funnel

    Screen-share through Instagram DMs, your booking software, and the last 90 days of new patient form submissions. We find where leads are stalling between 'interested' and 'booked consult.'

  2. Day 1–3 / Voice and tone

    Configure the brand voice and treatment knowledge base

    Pull your service menu, your treatment plans, your pre/post-care language, and your front-desk reply samples into the AI's knowledge base. Tested against 30–50 real DMs your team has answered before, tuned until the AI reads on-brand.

  3. Day 3–5 / Booking & deposit

    Build the consult booking flow with deposit

    Set up the consult booking page with a refundable deposit, configure the calendar in Vagaro/Mindbody/Boulevard, and wire SMS + email confirmations with the right pre-consult instructions.

  4. Day 5–7 / Channel coverage

    Deploy on Instagram, web chat, and SMS

    Connect the AI to Instagram DMs (Meta Business API), embed the chat widget on your site, and route SMS through your business number. Live-test every channel with internal staff.

  5. Day 7–9 / Follow-up sequences

    Build the post-consult sequences

    Configure the day-1, day-3, and day-7 post-consult sequences for leads who came in but didn't close. Tone is warm, references the quoted plan, offers questions or a re-consult, never pushes harder than that.

  6. Day 9–10 / Go live

    Cut over and train the front desk

    Flip to live. 30-minute training for the front desk on the dashboard, the escalation rules, and how to flag a conversation for personal takeover. We monitor every conversation for the first week.

  7. Day 14–30 / Tuning

    Tune voice and conversion thresholds

    Watch the actual conversations come in. Tighten the qualification questions where the AI is over-asking, soften the close where it's pushing too hard, and update treatment knowledge as new services launch.

Week 1, month 1

What we measure once it's live.

Four numbers on the dashboard. First: inquiry-to-consult-booking rate. Pre-SIS, this is typically 40–55%. Post-SIS, target is 70%+.

Second: consult show-rate. Pre-SIS without deposit collection, 70–85% is normal. Post-SIS with refundable deposit, target is 90%+. This number alone usually pays for the install.

Third: consult-to-treatment conversion. Largely unaffected directly by the install — that's still on your injector or aesthetician — but the post-consult follow-up sequence typically adds 5–12 points to the trailing 30-day conversion.

Fourth: reactivation revenue. We run the cold-lead reactivation quarterly. The dashboard shows how many of the 90-day-cold leads came back through it and what treatment plan they booked.

Common objections

What med spa operators ask before they say yes.

"My clients want to talk to a human, not a bot."

Mostly true on consults; less true on initial inquiries. The system intro line says 'I'm helping the team answer faster — want me to grab someone live, or can I get you on the schedule?' Most inquiries take the second path. The 10–15% who want a human are routed immediately.

"My voice is hard to replicate. I don't want a generic-sounding bot."

Tone-matching is the single thing we spend the most time on for med spa installs. We pull 30–50 of your actual SMS and DM replies, tune the AI against them, and you sign off on every templated response before launch. If it doesn't sound like you, it doesn't go live.

"I don't want to charge a deposit. My clients will balk."

Some will. Most won't. Refundable deposits in the $50–$100 range are now standard practice in higher-end med spas, and the no-show economics make the trade-off worth it. We can A/B test it: half the consults with deposit, half without, for 30 days. The data almost always wins the argument.

"What about HIPAA?"

Med spa work mostly falls outside HIPAA's strict reach (we're not billing insurance), but the patient privacy expectations are similar. We do not send treatment details over SMS, we never send identifying medical info without consent, and we route any explicitly medical question to a licensed provider. Conversations are stored in your CRM, not on a third-party platform we can access.

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Next step

Want this med spa install in your business?

Book a walkthrough. We look at your live intake, talk through the playbook above, and you decide whether it fits.

No commitment. No pitch deck. Just the numbers.