The phone is ringing. A patient is checking out, another just walked through the door, and the hygienist is bringing a third patient to the front desk. What happens? The phone is left ringing. You can’t be everywhere at once. After all, they’ll call back, right?
The chances are slim.
When we reviewed our dental call tracking data, covering hundreds of thousands of calls, we found something shocking. Around 35% of calls went unanswered, and out of those, 75% of callers didn’t try again. They likely moved on to the next dental office on their list. Can we blame them in a world that expects instant gratification?
You might think, “It’s just one missed call. Maybe that person had Medicare or asked about an insurance plan we don’t accept. No big deal, right?” It’s easy to convince yourself of that, but it doesn’t explain why the schedule looks light or why meeting next month’s production goal seems tough.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
Imagine you’re running a single-doctor practice, seeing patients Monday through Thursday, with Fridays reserved for managing the business. Thanks to effective marketing, your practice gets around 50-75 new patient calls each month (leading to around 25 new patient appointments). On average, 35% of those calls are missed. Here’s the breakdown:
- Total new patient calls: 75
- Missed calls (35%): 26
- Calls never returned (75% of missed calls): 20
If you’re good at converting calls into appointments—say 50%—then 10 of those 20 missed calls could have become new patients.
The average new patient generates around $850 in their first year. Missing those ten patients means you just lost $8,500 in revenue this month. Multiply that over 12 months, and that’s a $102,000 loss in new patient revenue for the year.
But the impact doesn’t stop there.
The average patient stays with a practice for about 7-10 years. Let’s be cautious and assume seven years. Those 120 lost new patients could have brought in a lifetime value of $714,000.
And it gets worse.
This is just for one year. If this pattern repeats over your 30-year career, you’ve potentially lost $21,420,000 in revenue. That’s a staggering number.
When “It was just one missed call” starts adding up to millions, the actual cost of missed opportunities becomes impossible to ignore.