Missed-call text-back for a dental practice
The front desk is on hold verifying benefits, checking out a patient and watching a second line ring. Between 15% and 35% of inbound calls go unanswered in a typical practice, and new patient calls cluster at 8am, at lunch, and in the last half hour of the day.
Run your own numbers in the calculator. A practice taking 80 new patient calls a month, missing a quarter of them, booking 60% of what it answers, at $1,500 in first-year value, is losing roughly $18,000 a month. That is usually larger than the entire marketing budget.
Text-back recovers 25% to 45% of missed calls and costs $30 to $100 a month. Two rules for dentistry: somebody has to watch the text inbox, and the message must not ask for symptoms or photos, because that pulls health information into a channel that may not be secure.
Two weeks in, working means every missed call has a reply inside 30 seconds.