A parent starts looking for ABA at night, after their child is asleep. Most ABA websites offer a contact form that gets a callback in a few days, by which point the family has inquired with two or three other providers.

The agent has the conversation your intake coordinator would have: the child's age, the funding source, the location and hours the family can do, whether a diagnostic report exists. It runs on web, WhatsApp, SMS, and email, and writes a structured record into Salesforce or HubSpot with the transcript and campaign attached. Ready families are flagged for your team first.

Inquiries that used to expire overnight become pipeline your team works in the morning.

In ABA the admissions funnel is the paperwork. The intake packet, the benefits check, the authorization, the assessment. Every step waits on information the family has not sent yet.

The agent gathers what your intake team needs while the parent is still in the conversation: the plan and member details, the policy holder, the diagnosing provider, and the availability that decides which team takes the child. It runs as a set sequence, so the same fields come back every time, and a parent who drops off halfway still leaves you what they gave.

It lands in your CRM as structured fields, so verification starts days earlier on a complete file.

Almost every ABA family is on more than one waitlist. They go with whoever reaches readiness first, and the provider who goes quiet for six weeks is usually not that provider. Silence on a waitlist is attrition.

Event-triggered campaigns on SMS and WhatsApp keep the family in the conversation they have had with you since the first inquiry: authorization approved, a documentation gap holding things up, availability opening nearer to them. Because the agent answers in the thread, a parent can reply and get a real answer instead of a broadcast. Anything needing a person reaches your intake team with the whole history attached.

Your waitlist stops quietly emptying into other providers' schedules.

A multi-location ABA organization gets inquiries from people who are not parents. School districts and IEP teams, pediatricians who work with autistic children and their families, payer case managers. All of them hit the same contact form, and none of them need the parent intake conversation.

The agent tells these apart early, collects only what your provider relations team needs to respond, and routes the case to them instead of into the parent funnel. Because these conversations touch schools and payers, it never speculates about coverage or authorization outcomes and hands off to a person quickly.

Your referral relationships stop depending on who checked the inbox, and your parent funnel numbers describe actual parents.

A parent describes their child and asks whether it sounds like autism, or how many hours their child will need. Those are not questions a website agent should answer, and every ABA leader asks about them first.

The agent stays operational, never clinical. It does not diagnose, does not comment on severity, and makes no promise about hours, progress, or a start date. It answers only from content your team has approved, and when a question falls outside it, says so and hands off instead of improvising from a general model. Those refusals run as set sequences you review as written.

Your clinical and legal leads know precisely what a parent will be told.

For an ABA provider the conversion event is a booked intake call or assessment. Sending a ready parent to a separate scheduling page is where that intent goes to die.

The agent books in the thread. A branded booking card shows live availability from your team's own Google or Outlook calendars, honoring the buffers and working hours you set, and distributing across your coordinators by round robin, least busy, or priority order. Qualifying details are collected conversationally on the way in, and everything the parent gave carries into the calendar invite, confirmation email, and coordinator notification.

Ready families land on your intake team's calendar in the conversation that started the inquiry.

ABA leaders can tell you how many inquiries came in and how many children started. What almost nobody can see is the middle: which step lost the family. The intake packet, the benefits check, the authorization wait, the waitlist.

One analytics home covers it. Conversion funnels show how many visitors become conversations, how many qualify, and how many complete each step you define. Field-capture analytics show which details never come back, which is usually where a packet stalls. Every number opens to the conversation behind it, and any view exports to CSV.

Your marketing lead can answer which source produced starts of care, and your intake lead can see which step is costing families.

No ABA organization launches a parent-facing agent because a vendor said it was fine. Somebody internal has to try to break it first. That review cycle is the real gate.

Before launch, Tars runs simulated parents against your actual agent. Personas and goals drive multi-turn conversations, and every transcript is scored two ways: deterministic code checks, and LLM-judge evaluators that assess whether the question was answered and whether the agent stayed inside its boundaries. Human review validates the evaluators themselves. You set the thresholds the agent must clear before it deploys.

You go live on evidence your own reviewers produced, and the improvement loop keeps running as real conversations teach you what you missed.