I recently contacted a bilingual psychologist in Chile after finding her through AI-assisted search. Her website included a contact form that invited prospective clients to explain what they were looking for, so I did. I gave her a fairly detailed description of my situation and what I wanted to explore in therapy. When she responded, her email was remarkably unremarkable. She thanked me for sharing what I had written and moved on to discussing possible times to talk. That was it.
There are certainly ways her process could be streamlined. Rather than exchanging emails to find a mutually available time, she could provide a scheduling link and eliminate another round of correspondence. But the more important part of the customer journey worked perfectly. The conversation continued from where I had left it. There was no request that I move from email to WhatsApp, then gaps in communication on WhatsApp, and later suspicious-sounding messages asking if I could remind the healthcare professional who I was again as they could see I contacted them but didn't know what I had said.
That sounds like an extraordinarily low bar. In practice, I've found that many South American businesses I encounter, not just this one psychologist, and not only in healthcare, fail to clear this low bar. What follows uses a few specific clinicians as examples, but the underlying pattern is one I see repeatedly across South American businesses more broadly, wherever a customer's first inquiry and a business's actual response happen through different channels or different people.
I have encountered clinicians whose websites or automated systems eventually move inquiries to WhatsApp, only for the clinician to contact the prospective patient later and effectively ask, who are you, and why did you contact my clinic. In some cases, disappearing message settings make the problem worse, because the business itself has destroyed the context it needs to continue the relationship it started.
I recently had an even stranger version of this experience with a multilingual Brazilian psychologist. I found his website, read about his work, completed his inquiry form, explained why I was contacting him, and provided both an email address and phone number. Instead of responding by email, he appeared on WhatsApp. He introduced himself as a psychologist and asked whether I was the person who had contacted him. Of course I knew he was a psychologist. I had deliberately searched for him, evaluated his website, and completed his form. With this Brazilian psychologist as an example, the interaction had technically continued. Linguistically, however, the conversation had started completely over.
In SEO strategy and research, we have significant insight from data, such as the typical intent that people have when searching keywords. For example, if people regularly search "bilingual psychologist in Brazil" and SEMRush shows a "C," this means commercial intent. The searcher is typically ready to buy compared to "I" which indicates searchers of this key phrase tend to only be looking for information and be shopping around. What I see consistently in many South American businesses attempting to capture English-speaking traffic is a lack of effective processes to capture commercial-intent buyers.
[Related: Spanish SEO for Clinicians: How to Attract U.S. Spanish-Speaking Patients in 2026]
My background is in linguistics, and there is a useful way of looking at customer experience that has little to do with marketing software: a customer journey is a discourse. Conversation is sequential. What somebody says now acquires much of its meaning from what happened immediately before it. Conversation analysts describe structures such as adjacency pairs, where a question makes an answer relevant, a greeting invites another greeting, and an offer anticipates acceptance or rejection. In computer-mediated communication, disruptions to these relationships can make conversations fragmented and harder to follow. Business communication has the same property.
I had already completed one conversational turn when I contacted the Chilean psychologist: here is who I am, here is why I am contacting you, here is what I am looking for. Her response was effectively, thank you, I received and understood what you shared, now let's determine when we can talk. The phrase "thank you for sharing" did more work than it might appear to do. She didn't have to write a lengthy summary demonstrating that she had read every sentence. She simply needed enough linguistic continuity to establish common ground: your previous communication exists in this conversation, I recognize it, and this is my response to it. Then she advanced the interaction.
Contrast that with, "Hi, I'm a psychologist, are you the person who contacted me." The business may possess all of the information from the original inquiry. But from the customer's perspective, the discourse has been reset, and now the customer has to help the business reconstruct its own conversation.
Channel choice makes this more complicated. There is a significant difference between a customer providing a telephone number as one field on a form and explicitly saying, please contact me on WhatsApp. I would not claim that every consumer interprets a telephone number field identically. Some practices routinely call or text. Expectations vary by provider, age, form design, and context. But that is precisely why a well-designed form should not make the business guess. It can simply ask how the customer would prefer to be contacted, offering email, phone, text, or WhatsApp as clear options.
Research on omnichannel customer behavior supports this broader principle: customers use different channels for different purposes, and factors including uncertainty, trust, time pressure, and the characteristics of the channel itself affect those choices. Effective omnichannel design therefore requires real integration across the customer journey, not merely the existence of multiple channels. This produces an important distinction. Multichannel communication simply means a business has several ways to contact people. Omnichannel continuity means the customer's context survives the movement between them. A business can have a website, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, and a phone number, and still provide an extremely fragmented customer experience. The technology itself is not the customer journey.
Sometimes changing channels is completely reasonable. A business may need to move from email to a secure patient portal. A salesperson may move from LinkedIn to a video call. A customer may begin on Instagram and eventually need to enter a scheduling platform. The problem isn't the transition itself. The problem is making the customer reconstruct the relationship after the transition happens.
Imagine instead that the Brazilian psychologist's WhatsApp message had simply begun, "Hi, thank you for the inquiry you submitted through my website." That one sentence would have changed the interaction substantially. I would immediately know that he knew who I was in relation to his practice, knew why he possessed my number, and was continuing an interaction I had deliberately initiated myself. If he then genuinely needed to verify that the WhatsApp account belonged to the person who submitted the form, that could have been handled separately, without erasing everything that came before it. Instead, the original interaction generated another task for me: help the professional establish why we are even talking. This matters particularly in healthcare, where the original inquiry may have required real vulnerability. Asking someone to explain a difficult situation once can be necessary. Making them repeatedly reconstruct it, because the organization's own systems don't preserve conversational context, creates unnecessary emotional and cognitive work for the person who was already trying to become a client.
Marketing psychology often invokes the Zeigarnik effect to explain why unfinished tasks remain mentally salient. The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological idea stating that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than finished ones and you can remain tense while the loop remains open. The popular version of that claim deserves some caution. A recent meta-analysis found that the famous memory advantage for unfinished tasks was not particularly robust, although the evidence was considerably stronger for the related tendency to want to resume an interrupted task once it has started. Research has also found associations between unfinished work and continued work-related thinking outside normal working hours.
There are micro-cues that can exacerbate the Zeigarnik effect on platforms like WhatsApp. Imagine I use this platform for personal social interactions as well. I can't simply turn off my email notifications like mental wellness guides often encourage for peace of mind after a certain hour to avoid disruption. Among receiving messages from friends, a Brazilian psychologist is popping up and saying "hi, I'm a psychologist. Are you the person who submitted something on my website?" When I respond in the affirmative and then could see that he was coming online regularly but not responding, the experienced reality is that he had opened a mentally salient and burdensome loop that created vulnerability and uncertainty. He had added to my cognitive load and did not quickly resolve this.
However, businesses do not actually need the Zeigarnik effect to understand the practical problem here. The simpler concept is interactional closure. A good customer journey progressively resolves uncertainty: an inquiry leads to an acknowledgment, which leads to scheduling, which leads to an appointment, which leads to the service itself. A badly designed one manufactures additional uncertainty instead: an inquiry leads to an unexpected channel change, which leads to an identity question, which forces the customer to repeat context, wait for instructions, answer another question, and only then move toward scheduling. The second business isn't merely asking the customer to take more steps. It is repeatedly reopening conversational work the customer reasonably believed had already been completed. That is a particularly frustrating kind of friction, because it feels genuinely pointless. The customer keeps thinking some version of, I already told you this, I already gave you that, I already explained why I'm here. Every one of those thoughts represents unnecessary customer effort that a better-designed process would never have required in the first place.
This is what the Chilean psychologist got right. She didn't perform some extraordinary feat of customer service. She simply behaved as though the message she received was part of an existing interaction, and because she did, I never had to think about the mechanics of contacting her. There is still one obvious improvement available. We still had to exchange messages about scheduling, and a simple scheduling link could have turned that entire back-and-forth into a single step attached to her original response. But notice that this is optimization, not repair. The underlying communication architecture already worked. That distinction matters. Businesses often reach immediately for another piece of technology, a booking tool, a CRM, WhatsApp automation, AI, when the underlying problem is actually much more basic than any of that: does the next interaction behave as though the previous interaction actually happened? This is important to understand as the guiding principle before then arranging a tech stack to better streamline customer journeys.
There is another reason this matters more now than it used to. I found the Chilean psychologist through AI-assisted search. She did not need to know that specifically, but by the time I completed her contact form, I had already carried out much of the customer journey entirely on my own. I had a problem. I searched for it. I encountered information about a provider. I evaluated her positioning. I visited her website. I read enough to become genuinely interested. I decided that access to her expertise might be worth paying for. Only then did I become visible to her at all.
This is increasingly important for South American businesses that assume prospective customers will always enter through whatever acquisition channel the business itself already understands best. A clinician might assume patients mostly arrive through referrals, simply because referrals are what she personally sees and tracks. She may understand Instagram because that's where she posts. She may understand WhatsApp because that's where she talks with the contacts she already has. Meanwhile, a prospective international customer may have searched Google in another language, asked an AI system for recommendations, compared several websites, read articles, checked credentials, and reached a purchasing decision entirely on her own, without the provider ever witnessing any of that process happening. The inquiry is not necessarily the beginning of acquisition. It may actually be the end of it. That changes the real job of the first human response. The customer doesn't need to be "captured." In many cases, she may have already selected you. The immediate task in that moment is much simpler than most businesses treat it: don't lose the continuity that got her there in the first place.
Businesses often audit their funnels by looking at qualitative data: counting clicks, conversion rates, abandoned forms, and appointment bookings. They should also audit the qualitative data in the conversation itself. Submit your own contact form as though you were a complete stranger, then continue through the entire process the way a real customer would. Count every time the prospective customer has to repeat information they already provided. Count every unexpected channel change. Count every time they have to identify themselves again. Count every occasion where they have to ask what happens next. Count every delay caused by manually coordinating something that could have simply been self-service. Count every message that serves the organization's own uncertainty rather than advancing the customer's actual task. Then ask one question at every transition point: does this interaction close or advance the conversational loop the customer already started, or does it force the customer to reopen one they already believed was finished?
A good customer journey does not require lavish personal attention. In fact, excessive personal attention can create its own problems when a business ends up substituting unlimited individual reassurance for a clear, repeatable purchasing process. What customers actually need is something far more scalable: continuity. Acknowledge what they already told you. Preserve their context. Respect the communication channel they selected, or explicitly negotiate a change with them rather than silently forcing one. Give them the next concrete action to take. Let them complete routine steps on their own whenever possible. The Chilean psychologist needed essentially one sentence to accomplish the most important part of all of this: thank you for sharing. Then she simply moved forward. Sometimes that one sentence is the entire difference between a business that owns a collection of communication channels and a business that is actually having a conversation.
If any part of this sounds familiar from the other side, a form that gets filled out and then answered as though nothing was written, a WhatsApp message that reintroduces you to someone who already introduced themselves to you first, this is one of the most common and most fixable gaps I see in how South American practices and businesses handle U.S.-facing inquiries specifically. While fixing this issue may require the use of some new technology, it also often involves greater cultural awareness of US consumer expectations and consumer experiences.
If you want a second set of eyes on your own intake process, from the first form field to the first reply someone actually receives, that's exactly the kind of audit I help clinicians and businesses run. You're welcome to read more on my blog, or reach out directly to discuss setting up a streamlined customer journey for a U.S. audience.