The new patient who called at 6:40pm and never called back
A missed recall appointment leaves a gap in your schedule. You can see it. A missed call leaves nothing at all, which is why practices underestimate it so badly.
The patient who called at 6:40pm did not leave a voicemail. They called the next office on the list, got a person, and booked. Nothing in your system records that this happened.
Why I will not quote you a statistic here
If you search for data on missed dental calls you will find a lot of confident numbers. Practices miss 30% of calls. Each one is worth $900. A clinic loses a quarter of a million dollars a year.
Follow those numbers to their source and almost every one leads back to a company selling call-answering software. They are not independent research. They are marketing material with a footnote.
I am not going to repeat them here, because the whole point of this site is that you should be able to check the numbers we give you. On missed calls specifically, I have not found a credible independent figure. So instead of borrowing someone else’s, here is how to measure your own.
Measure it yourself in one week
You need your phone system’s call log. Most VoIP systems export this. Ask for:
- Total inbound calls for the last 30 days
- How many were answered
- The time of day of the unanswered ones
Then separate the unanswered calls into three buckets. During hours when someone should have picked up. During lunch. Outside opening hours entirely.
That third bucket is the interesting one, and it is usually larger than owners expect. People call dental offices in the evening because that is when they are thinking about their teeth and not at work.
The part that makes it worse
Here is the asymmetry. An existing patient who cannot reach you will usually try again. They know you, they have a relationship, they will call back tomorrow.
A new patient will not. They are working down a list of three practices from a search result. Whoever answers first gets the appointment. There is no second chance and no record of the loss.
So your unanswered after-hours calls are disproportionately the calls you most wanted.
What to do about it, in order of cost
Free. Change your voicemail greeting to say when you open and give a link to book online, if you have one. Most practice voicemail greetings say nothing useful.
Cheap. Make sure your Google Business Profile hours are right, and that it offers a booking link. Many patients never reach the phone stage.
Real money. Have someone or something answer the phone outside hours. An answering service takes a message. An AI receptionist can answer questions about hours and insurance and take a booking request. Either beats voicemail.
Whichever you choose, the test is the same. Call your own office at 7pm this evening from a number nobody recognises, and listen to what a new patient hears.
Most owners who do this are unpleasantly surprised. It takes two minutes and it is the single most useful thing in this post.
How this connects to recall
The patients you are trying to bring back have the same problem in reverse. You call them during your office hours, which are also their work hours. They miss it. They mean to call back. They do not.
A recall programme that only calls during business hours is fighting the same battle your new patients are, from the other side. That is part of why ours pairs calls with texts and a tracked postcard, so there is always a way to respond at a time that suits the patient rather than the practice.
Context worth holding onto: the ADA’s Health Policy Institute found that in 2022, only 40% of working-age adults had seen a dentist in the past year. The demand exists. Plenty of it is calling offices that do not pick up.
If you want to see what your own inactive list is worth, the free report asks five questions and never asks for patient data.