How many patients does a night-time message cost you?
Updated:
There is no exact number, and do not trust an article that gives you one: it depends on the clinic, the specialty and how many clinics the patient wrote to at once. There is a way to measure it; this article explains it.
A patient never writes to just one clinic
A patient looking at their phone in the evening sends the same question to three or four clinics. The clinic that answers first thing in the morning competes with the clinics that answered at night; if the patient has been offered a time by someone else before morning, the appointment is already taken.
This is not a guess; it is how messaging works. We cannot know how many patients behave this way. You can measure how many do in your own clinic.
The 24-hour rule
On WhatsApp and Instagram, a business may write freely for 24 hours from the patient's last message. Once that window closes, only a template approved by Meta can be sent on WhatsApp, and on Instagram the clinic has to write from its own app.
Answering a night-time message in the morning narrows the window; waiting a day closes it. That is why the night-time reply is not courtesy but the door staying open.
Measure the loss in your own panel
The panel shows every day how many patients wrote, how many booked and how many seconds the first reply took. The follow-up inbox lists conversations that have gone unanswered for more than 20 hours: the doors about to close.
For a week, count messages during working hours and outside them separately. The figure is your figure, not a general percentage.
What a night-time reply should look like
Short, in the patient's language, with a time offered. "We will get back to you in the morning" does not hold a patient; "tomorrow 11:00 or 15:30 is open, which works for you" does. MedorAI answers a message arriving at 23:12 that way and books the appointment; when you arrive in the morning, it is in the panel.
On price questions the rule does not change: the figure you allowed in the table is spoken, and for the rest a lead lands in the panel and is answered in the morning with one click.
What the team does in the morning
Look at the appointments booked overnight and the price requests. Who wrote what is visible on the bubbles; the moment your team types into a conversation it wants to take over, MedorAI goes quiet.