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AI spectacle collections for opticians: from lab arrival to patient follow-up
The moment a job comes back from the lab, the patient hears about it. Reminders keep going until they collect or reply, and when they collect, one press sets their next recall.
Gavin explains
“No phone round, and no glasses sitting in a drawer for weeks.”
Watch it run
From back-from-lab to collected.
Illustration with sample data
TimeNo phone round to say glasses are in.
- Order
- KWI-2262
- Back from lab
- Wednesday
- Texts sent
- 2
Illustration with sample data
MoneyGlasses leave the drawer sooner, and the next recall is set on the spot.
How it works
What happens when a job comes back.
- Back from lab sends the textMarking the order back from the lab sends the patient a ready-to-collect text with your opening hours.
- Reminders until they replyA reminder every couple of days until the patient replies or collects.
- Collected sets the recallYour team presses Collected and picks 12 or 24 months. The next recall date is set there and then.
In detail
Questions practice owners ask.
The detail behind the pictures.
What is AI spectacle collections automation?
AI spectacle collections automation is about the moment a finished pair of glasses comes back from the lab: telling the patient it's ready, chasing a balance if one is due, and following up if nobody replies. This is not about debt collection. It is entirely about collecting glasses. It runs on order status in the operational layer; prescriptions and clinical notes stay in your practice management software and are never read.
What it is meant to do
The design has three linked jobs. A ready-to-collect text goes out the moment an order's status changes to "received from lab", with a fallback wording if the specific lens type can't be confirmed, so a patient is never sent an empty or broken message. A balance-invoice job handles any payment due on collection. A recovery step, a "janitor", exists for the exceptions: a patient with no mobile number on file, a number that's opted out of texts, or a message that simply never got a reply after several days, each of those becomes a task for a person to ring the patient directly, rather than a silent gap.
Every skip is designed to become a staff task, never a silent nothing. A patient who can't be texted because they've opted out still needs their glasses collected, so that case creates a manual-call task rather than quietly doing nothing.
How it was built
This part of the estate went through the same gate as everything else: evidence, specification, a prototype run against real order data, independent review, and an isolated import. Eleven separate defects were caught and closed by automated checks before it was allowed near a live message, including a safety monitor that once caused the very load spike it was meant to catch, and a baseline check that correctly refused to restart when it found records had moved since they were last verified. Both were fixed and the fixes are part of the build you get.
Switching it on in a practice is a short, deliberate sequence: a final fault-check run, a one-page staff notice so the team knows what is changing, and the owner's explicit go-ahead. Nothing goes to a patient before that.
Why it was built to refuse rather than assume
A patient whose phone can't receive a text, or who has opted out, cannot simply be skipped: someone still needs to tell them their glasses are ready. Every exception path in this design ends in a task for a person, never a dropped patient. That same discipline, refuse and flag rather than guess and carry on, runs through everything else Crewley does; see the agents overview for the same pattern applied to the rest of the practice.
Is this the same as debt collection software?
No. This is entirely about collecting spectacles that are ready, not chasing unpaid balances in the way a collections agency would. Any balance-invoice step is about a payment due on a specific order, not a wider debt process.
Who agrees when collection messages go live?
Your practice agrees the trigger, message wording, reminder cadence and staff handover rules during setup. The workflow is tested before you approve it for patient use.
What happens to a patient who can't be texted?
Their case becomes a task for a member of staff to ring them directly, rather than being silently skipped. The same applies to a patient who doesn't reply after several days.
Does turning this on require rebuilding anything?
No. It requires a short cutover sequence, a final check, a staff notice, and the owner's go-ahead, on top of a system that is already fully built and tested.
How does this connect to lab order tracking?
It picks up exactly where lab order tracking leaves off: once an order is marked back from the lab, collection automation takes over the patient-facing side. See the lab order tracking page and the patient recall page for the other side of keeping patients moving through the practice.
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