AI Call Assistants Helping Dental Practices Increase Revenue

Dental practices around the world are adopting AI call assistants to help increase business, improve customer services and ensure patients receive better treatment. 

Historically, dental practices would rely on front-desk staff to handle a high volume of calls, often resulting in missed calls, delayed bookings and lost revenue. 

As patients expect a fast response with clear information, AI call assistants were the obvious choice.

The benefits of AI call automation for dental practices

The nature of dental practices make them prime candidates to benefit from AI call assistants:

High inbound call volumes

Dental practices receive a wide variety of telephone communications ranging from bookings and rescheduling through to insurance questions and treatment follow-ups.

According to Resonateapp, the average dental practice received between 40-123 daily calls. 20-35% of these calls tend to go unanswered which can lead to significant losses in potential revenue.

Repetitive queries

A significant proportion of phone calls relate to queries regarding opening hours, pricing, procedures.

Time-sensitive scheduling

Appointments are time-sensitive and require a quick response.

Revenue leakage from missed calls

If patients can’t book in, the dental practice can’t charge them. Calls, especially outside of business hours or during busy peak times, need answering. 

Each missed call can represent a lost new patient or a cancelled appointment that doesn’t get rebooked.

How dental practices are using AI call assistants

Contemporary AI call assistants are being used by dental practices as a round-the-clock front desk to handle enquiries. Common workflows include:

Appointment management

If the AI call assistant is integrated into the calendar booking system, real-time availability can be offered to patients looking to book, reschedule or cancel their appointments. 

Patient triage

Not all dental work is an emergency, whilst some certainly is. AI systems can be trained to classify intent and urgency, helping to route more serious cases into emergency slots whereas routine checkups can be handled more accordingly.

FAQs

As with any medical procedure or checkup, dental patients can have many questions relating to their appointment. Whilst certain enquiries will require the expertise of a specialist human agent, many others can be handled by an AI call assistant. 

The business impact

Dental practices can’t afford to incorporate gimmicks into their workflows; the AI call assistants must deliver actionable improvements to the workflow. 

They do so by capturing bookings and enquiries around the clock, reducing the workload on the front-desk staff, limiting no-show rates and providing an opportunity to scale the operations.

For dental practices considering the ROI of incorporating an AI call assistant into their practice, consider the potential income from improved new patient acquisition, higher dental chair utilisation and fewer no-shows, without the associated admin costs of having a large front-desk team.

Implementation considerations 

If your dental practice is considering an integration of an AI call assistant, there are four key things to think about:

1. Integration

To maximise the efficiency of your new AI assistant, it should integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows and practice management tools, whether as a turnkey integration or through an API. 

2. Conversation quality

Your AI assistant must be able to hold conversation, handle a variety of accents and understand specific clinical terminology. 

3. Clear escalation plans

Even the most sophisticated of dental AI assistants won’t be able to handle every inquiry; sometimes only a specialist human agent will be able to help. The AI solution should have a clear and frictionless call escalation system in place.

4. Compliance

Most countries and jurisdictions have strict compliance requirements in place regarding the handling and storage of any medical data. Any patient information collected by your AI assistant will be subject to these laws and data protection regulations.

Introducing NetGeist

NetGeist builds custom tools that help businesses like yours to tackle textual challenges by automating, processing, and summarizing information. 

With a full range of speech to text and text to speech custom tools and processes available, NetGeist will work closely with your organisation to build a custom dental AI assistant that will deliver the full benefits of automation. 

No project is too big - our goal is to develop customized NLP solutions that would fit the concept of your company. Let us simplify your textual tasks with a unique solution, tailored specifically just for you.

Get in touch with us to discuss your project or answer any questions.