SimplePractice is the leading practice management platform for mental health and wellness professionals, serving over 250,000 solo and group practitioners across the United States. Many of SimplePractice’s customers run small businesses alongside their clinical work, often without a dedicated technical background. When they need help, they need it immediately - missed workflows can mean delayed appointments, failed insurance claims, and disruption to their practice.

That reality raised the bar for what SimplePractice needed from a vendor. Performance mattered, but so did trust. The team was searching for a partner willing to understand the nuances of their customer base, earn confidence through security and compliance, and stay invested in their mission.

The challenge: Serving a high-need customer base at scale

As SimplePractice grew, its existing approach of directing customers toward a self-service help library wasn't working for practitioners who needed immediate, contextual answers without shifting through articles. 

It also quickly became clear that continuing to hire against their new volume wasn't a sustainable path. However, the solution couldn't just be cost-efficient, it also had to be sensitive to who was on the other end of the conversation. Mental health professionals operate under strict regulatory requirements and compliance was essential for success. 

The evaluation: A vendor that didn't put them in a black box

The team ran a thorough evaluation process and came in with detailed questions, sample scenarios, and a clear sense of what good looked like. Decagon was able to distinguish themselves across both platform performance and how the team partnered with SimplePractice throughout the evaluation. 

"Decagon understood what we were doing and serviced us that way. It wasn't 'here's the solution to everything.' It felt like they were focused on what Decagon was going to do for us specifically, so we could focus on everything else. We didn't feel like we were being sold to."‍

Compliance was tested in real time. SimplePractice needed to confirm that Protected Health Information (PHI) would be handled correctly before moving forward. The Decagon team built redaction functionality customized to SimplePractice's needs, who then tested it extensively by pushing PHI through the system. The redaction happened within seconds.
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"We were able to assuage our fears around any sort of compliance issues during the sales process and actually see proven capability right then and there."

Duet: From support tool to strategic decision-making layer

SimplePractice joined Decagon at a particularly active moment in the platform's development, going live shortly after the launch of Decagon Duet - an AI partner that enables teams to build self-improving agents. 

The team adopted it quickly and has been using it to accelerate how they evaluate and prioritize product decisions. The most concrete use case so far: validating whether a new Agent Operating Procedure (AOP) is worth building. Rather than relying on anecdotal input from a handful of customer conversations, the product team can now query Duet against actual ticket volume to see how materially a given problem affects the customer base. For a company that has historically operated on quarterly decision cycles, this represents a meaningful shift toward faster experimentation.
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"We have VPs going directly into Duet themselves to pressure-test their ideas - asking whether a proposed solution is actually going to move the line. We've never had that kind of insight before."

Rob stress-tested Duet deliberately, pushing it toward requests it shouldn't fulfill. Rather than complying or hallucinating a response, it pushed back directly - a meaningful signal of trust in a landscape where AI tools have frequently over-promised.

The Insights and Voice of Customer tools have also generated excitement internally. For a company that has historically gathered customer feedback through manual keyword searches or curated conversations, the ability to contextually understand what customers are actually talking about has saved hours, if not days, of the team’s time. 
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"I have yet to show the voice of customer tool to anyone and not have their jaws drop. It’s giving us a completely new level of visibility into what customers are actually saying." 

The solution: A support experience built around the practitioner

SimplePractice’s agents are trained on their specific customer voice and knowledge base, with a focus on making interactions feel natural and contextual instead of scripted and sterile. Rather than routing customers into predefined decision trees, the agent engages conversationally, clarifying what a customer actually needs before directing them. For something like a rejected insurance claim - a sometimes stressful, high-stakes moment for a solo practitioner - the agent doesn't return a help article. It asks the right questions first, then guides the customer through from there.

Multilingual support also emerged as an added benefit. The agent aptly handles conversations in Spanish, Korean, and other languages, translating context back for the support team so they have visibility into what customers are asking across every interaction, regardless of language.

The results: Exceeding targets and reaching 85% deflection

Within one month of going live, SimplePractice exceeded its end-of-year deflection target of 66%, reaching 85%. 

But the more significant impact may be structural. The deflection volume has changed what's possible for the support team. SimplePractice is moving toward a model where every human support team member becomes a specialist - focused on the complex, high-judgment cases that make their support stand out as a product benefit to customers. 
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"We’re now able to show up for people the way they deserve. Routine questions get handled quickly, which frees us up to spend meaningful, human time on the more complex situations." 

The escalation experience has also been refined. Rather than swinging between full containment and a completely open handoff, the agent manages soft transitions - offering to connect customers with a human agent when appropriate, keeping context intact, and asking if there's anything else it can help with in the meantime.

What's next: Faster cycles, deeper intelligence

The near-term priority is building a tighter experimentation loop - moving from quarterly product decisions toward a model where small changes can be tested and evaluated quickly, informed by the ticket and conversation data that Decagon now surfaces in real time.

After just one month, SimplePractice has already changed the structure of its team, exceeded its annual deflection goal, and rethought what specialist support looks like. The next chapter is about using that foundation to move faster with cleaner data, shorter feedback cycles, and a support experience that continues to raise the bar for independent mental health practitioners across the country.