# Cost of missed calls: how to work out yours Picture a dental practice on a Tuesday lunch hour. The coordinator is in a consult, the phone rings out to voicemail, and the caller tries the next practice on the map. Short answer: the cost of a missed call is the booking it might have become, times what a booked patient is worth to you. You can work out your own figure from three numbers you already have. ## What does a missed call actually cost? A missed call costs nothing on the day. The phone stops ringing, the line goes quiet, and the schedule looks the same as it did a minute earlier. The cost turns up later, as a consult that never landed on the calendar. Nobody sends you an invoice for it, which is exactly why it is easy to ignore. So the useful way to price a missed call is as a chance. Some missed callers would have booked; many would not. The cost is the share that would have booked, multiplied by what a booked patient is worth to your clinic. The sum in words: missed calls in a typical week, times the share of those callers who would have booked, times the value of one booked patient. Multiply by the weeks in an average month to get a monthly figure. A bakery that lets its phone ring out at lunch has the same sum. Most of those callers wanted the opening hours. A few wanted a birthday cake for Saturday, and those few are the whole cost. A clinic works the same way, except the cake is a new patient who might stay for years. ## Why do clinic calls go unanswered? In most clinics the person who answers the phone is also checking patients in, taking payments, chasing insurance questions and confirming tomorrow’s list. The phone loses whenever two of those happen at once. Calls tend to slip at the same few times each week: - The first hour after opening, when last night’s voicemails and new calls arrive together. - Lunch, when the team is short and callers are on their own lunch break. - Busy treatment blocks, when the person who usually answers is with a patient. - Evenings and weekends, when the phone goes to voicemail or a recorded message. None of this means the team is doing a poor job. A clinic phone is a shared line with one pair of hands on it, and some calls will slip. The point of counting is to find out how many slip, and when, so you can decide whether it matters for your clinic. ## How do you count your missed calls? Start with the call log. Most business phone systems keep a record of calls that rang without an answer, calls where the caller hung up while waiting, and calls that went to voicemail. It may be called a missed call report, an unanswered call report or simply the call history. It usually lives in the admin side of the phone system rather than on the handset. - Pick a normal week. Skip holiday weeks, the week of a big promotion and any week the phones were down. - Count calls that rang out, hung up while waiting or went to voicemail. Keep calls during opening hours apart from calls outside them. - Count each caller once. A number that rang three times on Monday morning counts as one caller. - Take out callers your team rang back and reached the same day, if the log shows it. Those callers were not lost. - Mark which numbers belong to existing patients, if your practice software can match them. Their calls matter too, and they are worth a different amount. No report? Put a tally sheet by the phone for one normal week: a mark and the time for each call nobody picked up. Paper is fine here, and nobody has to learn a new screen. At the end you want one number: missed calls from people who could have booked, in a typical week. If you only have the after-hours count, use that and say so when you share the result. ## How many of those callers would have booked? This is the number most people guess, and it is the least certain one in the sum. You can get much closer than a guess with your own records. Start from the calls you did answer. Take a recent month and count the new-patient calls your team picked up. Then count how many of those callers booked an appointment, using your booking system or the team’s call notes. Out of each hundred answered new-patient calls, that is your answered booking share. Missed callers are a little different from answered ones. Some were existing patients with a quick question. Some were shopping around and rang three clinics in a row. Some would have called back anyway. So the share of missed callers who would have booked is usually lower than your answered booking share, and nobody can tell you exactly how much lower. That is why the calculator asks for two guesses. Set the high guess at your answered booking share or a little under it. Set the low guess well under it, low enough that you would bet on beating it. The gap between the two is honest: it shows how much you do not know yet. If you have no records of answered calls at all, keep a second tally next to the missed call tally: answered new-patient calls, and how many of them booked. One week of both gives you a first answer. ## What is one booked patient worth to your clinic? Use your own figure if you have one. Your practice software or your accounts can usually show what a new patient spends at a first visit, and what they spend in their first year with you. Both are useful, and they answer different questions. One visit is the cautious figure. It counts only what the booked caller would spend the first time. A first year is the fuller figure: your value per visit times the visits a typical new patient makes in their first twelve months. If most of your new patients come back, the first-year figure is closer to the truth. If you have no figure of your own, two public sources give a starting point. The American Med Spa Association’s 2024 industry report puts average spend per med spa visit at $527. Federal survey data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality puts average yearly dental spending at $887 per person with a dental visit in 2021, across all of that person’s dental care. Both are averages across very different clinics. Use them as a placeholder until you have your own number, and replace them as soon as you do. Implant and cosmetic dental practices need their own figure. One booked consult may lead to a full treatment plan, so a per-visit average says little. Use what an accepted case is typically worth to you, then lower your booking guesses to allow for consults that do not go ahead. Your [case acceptance rate](https://agentblue.io/glossary/case-acceptance-rate), the share of presented plans that patients accept, is the number to use for that. For the longer view of what a patient is worth over many years, see [patient lifetime value](https://agentblue.io/glossary/patient-lifetime-value). This guide stops at the first year on purpose, because later years are much harder to check. Sources - [American Med Spa Association, 2024 Medical Spa State of the Industry executive report recap](https://www.americanmedspa.org/news/2024-medical-spa-state-of-the-industry-executive-report-recap/), 2024-11-06 - [AHRQ, MEPS Statistical Brief No. 555, Dental Utilization and Expenditures, 2019-2021](https://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st555/stat555.shtml), 2024-03-01 ## What does the sum look like for one practice? Picture a general dental practice that has done the counting above. The numbers are an example, chosen to show the arithmetic, and they describe no real practice. > Example > > Missed calls from people who could have booked: 12 a week, which is 52 in an average month (12 × 52 ÷ 12). > > Answered booking share from last month’s records: 40 of each 100 new-patient calls. > > Booking guesses for missed callers: low 15 of each 100, high 35 of each 100. > > Value of a booked patient: $887 a year, the AHRQ average yearly dental spend, used as it stands. > > Low: 52 × 15% × $887 = about $6,919. > > High: 52 × 35% × $887 = about $16,143. > > Reading: the new patients behind one month of missed calls could spend about $6,919 to $16,143 on dental care over a year. Two things stand out. First, the range is wide, and that is fine: it comes straight from the gap between the two booking guesses. Second, the result is a value of care before any costs, and some of those patients would have gone elsewhere whatever happened. If this practice checked its records and found that missed callers looked a lot like answered ones, it could raise the low guess and narrow the range. If most missed calls turned out to be existing patients asking about parking, the range would fall. Either way, it now has a number it can argue with. ## What changes the number most? Every input multiplies the others, so a change to any one of them moves the result by the same share. Some inputs are much easier to get wrong than others, though. - The booking guesses. They are the least certain input and the only source of the range’s width, so narrow them with records. - Who is calling. A week of existing patients moving appointments costs far less than a week of new enquiries from an ad campaign. - When calls are missed. Someone calling at night about a toothache wants the next open appointment; a missed call at lunch may try again at two. - How fast someone rings back. A caller reached within minutes has had less time to book elsewhere than one reached the next afternoon. - The time of year. Holidays, school breaks and the start of a promotion all change who calls. If you keep one habit from this section, make it this: count new-patient callers separately from everyone else. It makes every other input easier to trust. ## When is the cost of missed calls small? The honest catch: for some clinics the answer to all of this is a small number, and that is a useful result too. It usually looks like one of these: - Most missed calls come from existing patients confirming or moving appointments, and they reach you later the same day. - Your team rings back quickly and reaches most missed callers. - Your schedule is full for weeks ahead, so an extra booking only pushes another patient later. - Your call volume is low enough for one person to handle the phone without help. If that sounds like your clinic, the sum will show it, and your time is better spent elsewhere. The tally still earns its keep: it shows when calls bunch up, which helps with staffing whatever you decide. ## What should you do this week? - Monday: pull last week’s missed call report, or put a tally sheet by the phone. - During the week: count answered new-patient calls and how many of them booked. - Friday: work out your answered booking share and set a low and a high guess under it. - Then put the four numbers into the [missed call calculator](https://agentblue.io/tools/missed-call-calculator) and keep the working it shows. Share the range with whoever runs your phones before you share it with anyone selling phone help. They will know which calls the report missed. ## Where does AgentBlue fit? If your number turns out large, the fix is about answering and following up. The [AI receptionist](https://agentblue.io/solutions/ai-receptionist) answers calls around the clock and hands a caller to your team with the details so far. [Missed call text back](https://agentblue.io/solutions/missed-call-text-back) sends a quick text to a caller nobody could reach, so the conversation can carry on. It is done for you: we set up, connect and run it, and it is live in about 2 weeks after we receive access to your systems. Bring your range to the demo call and we will go through it with you. ## Frequently asked questions ### How much does a missed call cost a dental practice? It depends on three of the practice’s own numbers: how many callers it misses, how many of them would have booked, and what a booked patient is worth. A general practice and an implant practice can get very different answers from the same number of missed calls, so work it out with your own figures using the method above. ### Should calls that went to voicemail count as missed? Yes, unless someone rang the caller back and reached them the same day. A voicemail is a missed call with a note attached. Some callers hang up rather than leave a message, so check the abandoned calls in the report too. ### Do missed calls from existing patients count? Count them, but keep them apart from new enquiries. An existing patient who could not get through may still rebook later, so their missed call usually costs less. It still costs something: a patient who cannot reach you to move an appointment may simply not turn up. ### Can I use the missed call statistics I see online? Treat them with care. Most figures that circulate about missed calls come from companies that sell phone tools, and they vary widely from one source to the next. Your own call log is a better source for your clinic than any of them, which is why this guide uses none. ### How often should I recount? Recount after anything that changes your calls: new opening hours, a new ad campaign, a change in the team or a new phone system. Otherwise a quick recount each quarter keeps the number honest. ## Book your free demo [Book a demo](https://agentblue.io/demo) ### What to expect - Free, 30 minutes, no obligation - Pricing tailored to your clinic - A person replies within one business day, Monday to Friday - Limited onboarding slots each month Source page: