Coaching with Christianne

When it comes to therapy and coaching, time and energy are precious. For many small practices, client inquiries can take up hours every week - time that could be spent focusing on actual sessions. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Coaching with Christianne, a local therapy and coaching business based in Loughborough, to create a solution that would make her workflow smoother while improving the experience for her clients.

The challenge

Christianne found herself asking the same questions repeatedly which slowed down the process of helping her clients, such as:

• preference of coaching style
• what they are actually seeking help with
• how it’s affecting their life

A lot of these questions are still beneficial to be asked in one-to-one sessions, but having the knowledge before the sessions helps to identify what needs doing from the start without wasting additional time. As part of our solution, it also helped clients get access to help quicker and before they had even had a session as a key problem in today’s mental health climate is the lack of availability in sessions and help available and a small business is no stranger to high stress from high workload.

My approach

The goal was clear: build a simple, reliable chatbot that could get answers to relevant questions, collate it into an approximation to what the issue is based on pre-determined criteria as part of an ‘inner’ / ‘outer’ / ‘in-between’ approach to issues in clients’ lives, and then suggest ways to help the client.

There were a few key things to note:

• What questions to ask - Christianne’s sign-up form had a lot of relevant questions, and so these had to be factored into the chatbot too
• Ease of use and design integration - as it was going to be used on the website (and for its purpose), it had to be easy to use and it also had to fit with the website’s design and branding guidelines
• WordPress integration - as the website runs on WordPress, integration had to be considered as a strong factor - either via PHP or JS widget
• Client privacy is important - personal issues are a private matter, and so we were very clear on what data we actually needed to collect (i.e. email and name is not important at this stage)

The solution

The end result was a custom chatbot widget that could be easily integrated into the WP website using either PHP or JS, though JS was preferred due to the ease of use. The chatbot used the following tech stack:

• Python - FastAPI for handling the server-side routes, and Transformers for handling the identification of issues from qualitative input
• JavaScript - React.js was used to design the front-end part of the chatbot
• PHP - An alternative to sole JS integration, as it acted as a container for the JS component

And then ultimately it was shipped with a Dockerfile, and clear instructions on how to use it and how it functions to meet the client’s needs.

Reflection

This project reminded me how powerful even a simple digital tool can be for small businesses. A chatbot doesn’t need to be overly complicated - it just needs to be reliable, easy to use, and aligned with the brand’s voice. For service-based businesses like therapy or coaching, it can free up valuable time and make clients feel more connected.

Final thoughts

Working with Coaching with Christianne on this project was a rewarding experience, and as it was my first real-world paid experience, it was very insightful into how to best operate on tasks and communicate with the employer. If you’re a therapist, coach, or small business owner looking for a way to streamline client communication without losing the human touch, a custom chatbot might be exactly what you need.