The desk number is the front door
Patients message the number on the appointment card. They ask about hours, which documents to bring, whether a referral is required, and how to reach the building. Those questions are repetitive, and they arrive while the person who usually answers is doing something else. A second phone in a drawer does not fix that. A second person who can open the same chats does.
Connect the desk number once. It becomes one session. Share it with the Google emails of the reception staff who should see it. Choose view-and-send for people who reply, and view-only for someone who needs to read what was said without writing back. Two people on that session are not two WhatsApp accounts. You pay for the number, €5 per month on the Standard plan, not for each receptionist.
There is no assignment of a patient chat to a named role. If three people have send access, all three can see the conversation. That matches a desk where anyone at reception may pick up the thread. It does not match a setup where a message must be locked to one clinician and hidden from the others. Do not use a shared session for conversations that only one licensed person should read.
Overflow while the desk is already busy
The painful hour is not the empty morning. It is the stretch when every chair is full and the phone is also buzzing. WhatsApp then becomes a second queue that nobody owns, because owning it means ignoring the person standing at the counter. A shared session lets someone who is not at the counter clear the messages that are simple, while the counter keeps moving.
Reply time on that session is visible on its own, not averaged with a different branch or with a private line. If the desk is slipping, you see it on that number. You also see whether the phone behind the session is still online. A WhatsApp Web-style link goes quiet when that phone is off, so a dead session is a phone problem before it is a staffing problem.
Contacts from the desk number collect into the contact list, searchable by name, phone, or tag. That list is not a clinical record. Chato does not store a treatment history, a diagnosis, or a booking calendar. Keep those in the system you already use for patients. Use the inbox for the conversation the patient started on WhatsApp.
Questions that arrive after the desk looks closed
A large share of desk messages are not urgent and do not need a person: when do you open, where do I park, what should I bring. The included chatbot can answer those from documents you upload, on the desk session only. A clinical question, a result, or anything that depends on a specific patient stays with a person. You enable or disable the bot per session, so a private line never has to inherit the desk's answers.
The bot does not book an appointment into a practice-management system, and it does not send a template campaign to patients who have not written first. It replies inside the chats on the number you connected. Overnight, that is often the difference between a patient arriving with the right paperwork and a patient arriving to a closed door with the wrong letter.
If a second site has its own published number, connect that number as another session. Do not fold it into the first desk. Patients at the second site are messaging a different door. Staff at the second site get a share of their own session. A manager who covers both can hold both sessions on one login without giving every receptionist access to both.
What this inbox is not, in a clinic
Chato is not medical software. It does not claim to be a health record, a prescribing tool, or a compliant archive for clinical notes. Do not paste clinical detail into a shared session unless the people with access are supposed to have it, and unless that matches the rules you already follow for WhatsApp on the desk phone. Sharing a session widens access on purpose. Treat that the way you would treat handing someone the desk phone.
It is also not the official WhatsApp Business API. There is no Meta template approval and no WhatsApp Business Account setup inside the product. The desk keeps using the WhatsApp app it already has, linked with a QR code. If a hospital group requires the official API for a central number, that is a different project.
For a single desk, the setup is short. Sign in, scan the desk phone, invite the people who cover reception, and decide whether the bot should take the hours-and-parking questions. The trial covers one session for seven days, with no card. A branch number, if you need one, is another €5 per month after you subscribe.
How a shared session works · Link the desk phone · One price for the desk number · What the included chatbot will and will not answer