There are many ways of levelling up your practice revenue, from taking on more dentists to offering a greater range of treatment options and delivering more chairside treatments. But these demand notable investments, and paying for new staff, new technologies and perhaps added building work might be a blow to your business.
For a more cost-effective solution to improving your finances, dental practice owners should instead focus on what they already have in place and locate the areas where revenue is potentially lost. A major area for this is the practice phoneline, an often-overlooked source of income that must be valued and supported to enhance your business.
Missed call problems
When a person calls a dental practice, it is likely for one of the following:
- To book or manage an appointment (with varying degrees of urgency)
- To make an enquiry ahead of an appointment
If the person is not already a patient at the practice but is looking to become one, that increases your revenue if an appointment is booked, and that depends on the call being answered in the first place.
In the event of a person’s call being missed by the administrative team, 87 per cent are unlikely to ring again or leave a voicemail, instead heading to one of your competitors to receive the help they need.[i] If the person is calling due to an urgent problem, such as tooth ache, then this is especially true – there is no time to wait for a reply. Every missed call therefore has the potential to impact your revenue and support your competitors, placing your business at a disadvantage.
But how much revenue is actually lost from unanswered calls? There is no exact science, but practice owners must be able to find out how many calls are missed on a daily, weekly, monthly and perhaps annual basis, in part because some practices may have slower periods in the year (such as a quiet September when children return to school). To work out the number of missed calls, you should have active reports as well as details on how many of the calls have been followed up – this paints a picture of how many patients have fallen through the cracks.
How much is a phone call worth?
Calculating the cost of a missed call can vary. For instance, imagine your dental practice receives 200 phone calls every week. Of these, 40 per cent / 80 calls go unanswered. If even half of those calls have genuine enquiries, then there is a reasonable chance that 25 per cent / 20 of these would have booked an appointment. How much this is worth is dependent on the average patient lifetime value of your practice, e.g. £1,500. Multiplied by 20, that is £30,000 of revenue that the practice is missing out on – and just one from one week of missed calls. This is especially concerning as new patients are lucrative, with a high first-year value owing to the necessary X-rays, initial treatments and multiple appointments. Converting leads is a crucial part of any business, and being able to identify the areas where this is failing ensures the gaps are closed.
Dental practices that report high numbers of missed calls must then discover why that is – what is causing the calls to go unanswered? There are several reasons, with the leading one most likely to be an over-stretched administrative team. Whether having a high flurry of patients in and out of the practice each day, an understaffed reception desk or inexperienced employees, the margin for missed phone calls is high.
Reception reinforcements
As the patients in the practice are the priority, the admin team should feel confident dealing with immediate tasks and also comfortable that a ringing phone will be answered. This is where an AI receptionist can make a colossal difference; if the admin team are engaged with a patient, the practice can refer the incoming call to an AI system after a designated number of rings, where enquiries are answered and appointments can be booked with ease.
For a first-class solution, consider RoboReception AI. Able to increase revenue by taking all the calls your admin team can’t – including outside of opening hours – the system refers patients to AI Joe, a supportive helping hand designed by dentists to better help dental practices. Whether booking appointments or answering enquiries, integrating RoboReception AI reduces the workload for the admin team, optimising patient care and ensuring no lead is missed.
Inefficient workflows can hinder the productivity of your dental practice. By highlighting the importance of every phone call to your business, you can better adapt the dental practice to reduce the amount of lost revenue and boost the productivity of your business.
To find out more visit www.roboreception.co.uk or call us on 07511 085684
Book a demo at https://calendly.com/roboreception/roboreception-demo-1
Author: Dr Grant McAree (BDS BSc. HONS), co-founder of RoboReception
[i] Dentaleconomics.com. (2018). Phone calls: Are you losing patients at ‘Hello?’ [online] Available at: https://www.dentaleconomics.com/practice/article/16385208/phone-calls-are-you-losing-patients-at-hello [Accessed 8 July 2026].
