Client profile
For families seeking autism services, completing an intake form is often only the first step. The process that follows can involve scheduling, payment, administrative questions, and uncertainty about what happens next.
At Ascent Autism, the team identified a critical gap in that journey: prospective families would begin the intake process but not always complete the steps required to schedule an assessment. Rather than relying exclusively on staff to manually monitor and follow up with every prospective family, Ascent partnered with Empromptu to build a personalized patient-onboarding and communication system.
The challenge
Ascent’s website and intake experience capture interest from prospective families, but not every family completes the full journey. Some begin an intake form but do not finish it. Others submit their information but stop before choosing an assessment time or completing payment.
Each stalled journey represents both a family that may still need help, and a missed opportunity for Ascent to provide timely support.
Manual follow-up can be difficult to scale. Team members must determine where each family stopped, identify the appropriate next action, personalize the outreach, and follow up at the right time. Ascent wanted a system that could respond to each family based on their specific stage in the onboarding journey — not a generic email campaign or repetitive reminder sequence.
The solution
Empromptu and Ascent are building an AI-powered onboarding system that recognizes where a prospective family has stopped and initiates the appropriate follow-up. The system is designed around clearly defined onboarding stages, including intake started, intake completed, assessment time not yet selected, appointment selected but not confirmed, and payment started but not completed.
For each stage, Ascent can configure:
- •When outreach should occur
- •Whether the message is sent by email or text
- •Whether it should be reviewed by a team member
- •Whether it can be sent automatically
- •The instructions that guide the AI’s tone, content, and objective
The AI then generates personalized communication based on the family’s information and their current point in the journey. The system is also designed to preserve human oversight: Ascent can begin with messages requiring approval, review how the AI performs, and gradually move appropriate scenarios to automatic sending.
Reducing friction for families
The long-term vision extends beyond sending reminders. Ascent wants families to be able to continue much of the onboarding process directly through a conversation. For example, rather than sending someone back to a generic scheduling page, the AI could:
- •Present available assessment times
- •Ask which option works best
- •Confirm the family’s time zone
- •Book the selected appointment
- •Direct the family to payment only when necessary
Known information can be carried forward so families do not repeatedly enter the same names, contact details, or intake information. The objective is to reduce the number of steps required to receive help while maintaining a personal, one-to-one experience.
Building a measurable onboarding system
The platform is being built not only to conduct outreach, but also to measure what happens afterward. Ascent will be able to evaluate:
- •Which onboarding stage creates the most drop-off
- •How many families re-engage after AI outreach
- •How far families progress after a conversation
- •Which messages and communication channels perform best
- •Whether families ultimately schedule and complete payment
- •Where the booking or payment experience may need improvement
This creates a feedback loop between communication, conversion, and product experience. Instead of simply measuring whether a message was delivered, Ascent can understand whether the interaction helped a family move forward.
From one workflow to a connected operating system
The onboarding agent is the latest step in a broader partnership between Ascent Autism and Empromptu. Over the previous six to seven months, the teams have worked together across multiple parts of Ascent’s clinical and operational environment, including:
- •AI-assisted session documentation
- •Personalized parent communication
- •Facilitator review workflows
- •Airtable-connected operations
- •Website revamp, scheduling, and payment workflows
- •Email and SMS communication infrastructure
- •Operational dashboards and reporting
What began as an effort to reduce documentation burden has evolved into a connected technology foundation spanning clinical delivery, family communication, operations, and growth. The patient-onboarding system builds on that foundation by connecting Ascent’s intake, scheduling, payment, communication, and reporting workflows into a coordinated experience.
“I think we built an entire customized tech stack over the course of the past six or seven months. I’m impressed, and I’m very happy with what we’re building.”
Faraz Fadavi
Ascent Autism
“You’ve built a very high-quality, personalized, non-repetitive sales motion.”
Faraz Fadavi
Ascent Autism
What comes next
Ascent and Empromptu are continuing to refine the onboarding system before full deployment. The next phase will focus on:
- •Finalizing messaging strategies for each onboarding stage
- •Connecting email and SMS delivery
- •Enabling direct scheduling support
- •Tracking conversion attribution
- •Measuring how far AI-assisted conversations move families through the funnel
- •Establishing the appropriate balance between human review and automation
Once deployed, the teams will evaluate performance using real conversion, response, scheduling, and operational-efficiency data.
