A message arrives at 9:12 on a Wednesday evening. It says: "hi do you do lip filler and how much." It arrives on Instagram, because that is where the person was standing when they thought of it.

Your front desk closed at six. The person who runs the Instagram account is the same person who runs the treatment room, and she is with a client until half seven and then going home.

Thursday morning there are eleven notifications. Two are DMs, one is a comment, one is a text to the clinic mobile, three are emails, and the rest are people liking a post from Monday. The lip filler question is somewhere in there.

She replies on Friday. The person booked somewhere else on Thursday afternoon.

Where the enquiry actually goes

Aesthetics has a particular shape of problem. The enquiry arrives on the channel where the decision got made, not the channel you would prefer to be contacted on. Somebody sees a before-and-after at nine at night and asks the question in the app they are already holding. They do not go and find your website, and they will not wait until business hours to ask, because the impulse does not survive that long.

So the enquiries scatter. Instagram DMs, Facebook messages, the clinic mobile, the booking email, occasionally the website form. Four apps means four places to forget. A message on Instagram at 9pm competes with a text and an email, and whichever app you did not open that day is where the enquiry dies.

The second leak sits at the other end of the visit, and it is larger than most owners think. Someone comes in, has a genuinely good experience, thanks the practitioner sincerely, and leaves. That is where it ends. Most happy customers never leave a review, because nobody remembers to ask — not the client, and not the person at the desk who was already checking in the next appointment. The unhappy ones remember entirely on their own. That asymmetry is why a clinic's public rating so often sits below its actual standard of care.

There is a third leak, quieter than both. The enquiry that was answered but never picked back up. Someone asked about a consultation in March, got a price, said they would think about it, and was never contacted again. Not because anyone decided against it. Because there was no list.

What gets installed

How the review funnel works, and what it refuses to do

Every client gets the same link.

We never screen anyone out based on how we think they will rate you. That practice — asking how it went first, and showing the Google link only to the ones who say it went well — is review gating. It breaks Google's review policies, and it can cost you the profile along with every review already on it. That is a far worse afternoon than a three-star.

We do not offer a gift card, a discount, or anything else in exchange for a review, for the same reason.

On the higher tiers, monitoring and drafted replies are included, which means a response to a difficult review arrives in front of you as a draft rather than as a task on a list. You send it, or you rewrite it. Nothing gets posted in your clinic's voice without you reading it first.

What you approve before anything runs

That last point matters more here than anywhere else on this site. No automated message answers a medical question, tells someone a treatment is suitable for them, quotes a dose, or gives aftercare advice. The mechanism acknowledges, routes, schedules and asks for reviews. Clinical conversation stays with clinicians, and the acknowledgement is written to hand the person to a human rather than to sound like one.

Consent handling follows CASL. A reply asking to stop ends the thread and is recorded.

What this does not promise

We sell the mechanism, not the market.

We do not promise a star rating, a number of reviews, or that any given enquiry becomes an appointment. Whether somebody books depends on your pricing, your practitioners, your location, and what they saw on three other clinics' feeds the same evening. None of that is ours to control, so none of it goes in your agreement.

What is ours is narrower. Every enquiry gets acknowledged in seconds on the channel it arrived on, all four channels land in one thread list, every completed visit triggers a review request in wording you approved, and every client gets the same link. That is the machine, and that is what gets built, operated and put in writing.

Where this sits in the product line

Each part of the mechanism above is a product with a page of its own, and each one states what it does and what it needs from you.

Automatq guarantees the agreed launch remedy — not lead volume, customer behaviour, booked jobs, closed revenue, or return on investment.