Emrah Cinik is a Turkey-based specialist clinic and surgical center providing hair transplants, dental, aesthetic and plastic surgery treatments. It focuses on medical tourism, attracting patients from around the globe with its expertise and affordability, managing inquiries in 15+ languages across 34 channels.

The problem: Fragmented operations and manual processes across 34 channels

Emrah Cinik’s patient journey begins long before a procedure is booked. Patients usually discover the clinic through paid ads on Meta, Google and TikTok or through organic social channels, then reach out via instant messaging or call. Medical consultants are expected to respond quickly, collect key information and move each patient through a consultative journey that could take months or in some cases, years. After the procedure, conversations are handed off to a dedicated post-operation care team that provides support for up to a year.

The business had multiple separate WhatsApp Business accounts and other messaging channels for different teams and campaigns, so conversations were scattered across platforms and phones. As lead intake and tracking were largely manual, first-contact response times were delayed, and consultants had to monitor several apps and devices in parallel just to stay on top of patient conversations. While the business relied on a CRM to keep patient data up to date, keeping it in sync with the latest data from each conversation also required manual effort. When it wasn’t updated, patients had to repeat themselves, and follow-ups went overlooked because the team couldn’t see reminders in the conversation itself.

Emrah Cinik first tried one WhatsApp Business Solution Provider to organize and automate conversations, but this only created additional friction. Outbound messages were not delivered reliably, and incoming patient messages sometimes failed to reach consultants even when there were no underlying Meta-side errors.

The respond.io solution

Kutay Duran, CRM Revenue Intelligence Manager at Emrah Cinik recommended that the team adopt customer conversation management platform respond.io as a better solution. With respond.io, medical consultants and post-operation teams could manage global patient communication, connect conversations with CRM data and automate lead qualification and routing to reduce manual work and maintain quality of patient care.

All teams manage global patient conversations from one inbox

Emrah Cinik had a total of 34 WhatsApp numbers and social accounts to separate lead sources by campaign, such as Google Ads landing pages, organic web traffic and social media; however, managing these channels across separate phones and platforms led to slow replies and missed messages. With respond.io, the business unified all these accounts in a single inbox and set up the Lifecycle feature to provide context on where each lead is in their journey.

This gives a team of 30+ medical consultants and their team leaders one place to manage incoming inquiries, assignments and follow-ups. It also helps quality control teams monitor patient conversations without switching between apps and devices, and keep lifecycle stages updated to ensure they’re transferred smoothly to post-op care after completing treatment. The post-op team knows a patient is ready for follow-up based on their lifecycle stage, which is visible to all users.

AI Agents qualify patients and filter spam

Emrah Cinik receives a high volume of international inquiries, but a portion of these are spam, scam attempts, job applications and promotional outreach which wasted consultants’ time and cluttered up the CRM with low-quality contacts. Now, the business uses an AI Agent to filter out irrelevant conversations before they reach consultants, so only qualified inquiries are passed on with context.

This gives consultants cleaner lead data and more complete patient summaries before they take over so they can provide prompt, informed advice to help patients make a decision on treatment. The AI Agent recognizes over 15+ languages and responds instantly in the lead’s language 24/7. This keeps qualified leads warm and prevents them from seeking out competitors. Consultants then pick up the conversation with clean lead data and complete patient summaries so they can provide prompt, informed advice to help patients make a decision on treatment.

AI Agents pick up voice calls when a patient switches from chat to call

Respond.io AI Agents also seamlessly handle incoming voice calls. If a chat is being handled by the AI Agent, it also takes voice calls from the same patient. This allows the clinic to keep AI-led intake consistent across both chat and voice. The AI Agent summarizes both initial chats and calls into Zoho CRM, so consultants can continue conversations with the right context instead of starting from scratch.

Next, the clinic will expand Voice AI to cover incoming calls outside consultant shift hours so it can provide 24/7 coverage for global patients without sacrificing quality.

Patient data now syncs automatically between Zoho CRM and respond.io

Using respond.io Workflows and the HTTP Request Step and webhooks, Emrah Cinik built a custom integration between respond.io and Zoho CRM to keep both platforms in sync while allowing consultants to work primarily from respond.io.

When a new patient comes in through respond.io, the clinic’s respond.io AI Agent collects key information in the first interaction. That information is used to automatically trigger the Workflow to create the lead in Zoho. When a lead enters Zoho through another channel, respond.io automatically creates the corresponding contact and assigns it to the right consultant who follows up with the lead.

Updates for key Lifecycle stages are also synchronized between the two platforms, so consultants see what to prioritize and can move processes forward directly from respond.io.

“Respond.io’s AI Agents answer and qualify leads on every channel and push clean, structured data into our CRM automatically. For a clinic managing patients across 34 channels, that omnichannel consistency makes the difference between a lost lead and a booked procedure.”
Kutay Duran, CRM Revenue Intelligence Manager at Emrah Cinik

Image showing a medical consultant with a patient in the clinic in the evening.

The results

By moving to respond.io, Emrah Cinik unified 34 channels in a single inbox, giving its medical consultants, quality control and post-operation teams one place to manage global patient conversations. Its integration setup with Zoho CRM seamlessly syncs all patient data in both respond.io and Zoho, so consultants always have the most up-to-date context.

With the AI Agent handling first interactions, the clinic now achieves an average first response time of roughly 26 seconds instead of the minutes to hours it took for humans to respond, helping patients get faster replies across languages and time zones. It also filters out spam and irrelevant inquiries before they enter the CRM, allowing consultants to focus on qualified patients.

With respond.io, Emrah Cinik has built a scalable communication operation that supports 10,000+ monthly patient interactions, CRM synchronization and post-operation care, while laying the foundation for expanded 24/7 coverage with Voice AI Agents. With this reliable system in place, it can comfortably grow patient volume even higher without adding headcount.

Want to use AI Agents to instantly answer chats and calls from potential patients? Contact us for a free consultation today!