The Doers Webinar Recap: How Fixing Dental Missed Calls Can Drive Real Practice Growth

In 2026, the biggest challenge for dental practices isn't attracting new patient leads; it's ensuring those leads convert into appointments. The largest growth leaks often hide in plain sight: unanswered calls, delayed follow-ups, and limited visibility into what happens when a patient reaches out. These quiet problems can silently undermine your new patient growth and waste your marketing investment.

As Kyle Kazak (Co-founder & CTO of Deploy) puts it, “Marketing does its job; phones determine whether that demand actually turns into production”. In other words, once a prospective patient calls your office, marketing’s job is done; it’s up to your practice’s phone handling to convert that lead into a booked appointment. If calls go unanswered or follow-ups lag, no amount of ad spend can rescue those lost opportunities.

In the latest Doer’s webinar, Kyle Kazak explores this very topic with Carlos Restrepo to uncover how missed calls, slow responses, and the lack of visibility into phone performance create a hidden revenue leak in dental practices. The webinar also touched base on solutions to improve visibility and how automation tools such as VoiceStack can plug these leaks, recapture lost revenue, and boost your new patient conversion rates. The webinar emphasises that the cost of inaction is simply too high, but the fix is within reach. Let’s dive in.

Why Reducing Dental Missed Calls Matters More Than Marketing?

You can pour thousands into marketing to make your phone ring, but it won’t grow your practice if those calls go unanswered or unconverted. Phone handling is where your front desk turns marketing interest into actual appointments. Many practices focus on generating more inquiries, while neglecting the lead wastage happening on the phones. Lost revenue isn’t usually from a lack of leads; it’s from letting existing leads vanish untracked and unanswered. Hence, before you spend another dollar on advertising, it is important to make sure that your front desk is equipped to capture every call your marketing generates. Effective phone handling turns marketing expenses into actual ROI, making it one of the highest-impact areas to improve. In today’s on-demand world, speed matters, especially when a potential patient is on the line. If your practice doesn’t answer promptly or return calls quickly, patients will likely move on to the next Google result or dental office. Industry data suggests that roughly 30% - 35% of inbound calls go unanswered on average. In some offices, it’s even worse. Every ring that goes to voicemail isn’t just a missed call; it could be a missed new patient who might have been worth thousands over a lifetime of care.

When a prospective patient leaves a message or submits a form, the clock starts ticking fast. Respond too slowly and they’ve likely booked elsewhere.

Contacting a lead within 30 seconds can boost conversion rates by over 90%.

Patients seeking a dentist often reach out to several practices; whoever responds first often wins the appointment. A real-world example illustrates this point: a multi-location dental group was averaging a 6-hour response time to new inquiries. By the time they got back to people, those would-be patients had often lost interest or contacted another office. After implementing faster follow-up processes using VoiceStack’s real-time alerts and automation, they slashed their average response time down to just 20 minutes, and the impact was dramatic. Their inquiry-to-appointment booking rate jumped from 65% to 82%, and their schedule utilization climbed from 70% to 91%, effectively filling more chairs by simply responding quicker. In other words, a timely callback turned more inquiries into actual appointments.

This is the proof that missed calls and slow follow-ups are silent growth killers. If you’re not quick to pick up and prompt in calling back, you might as well be handing those patients to the practice next door. On the flip side, by improving your speed-to-lead, answering calls immediately and following up on messages rapidly, you can dramatically improve conversion without increasing your marketing spend. It’s about capturing demand, not just creating it. Every call you miss or delay is essentially a patient you could have had. The good news is that with the right approach and tools, you can catch almost every one of those opportunities before they slip away.

Improving Dental Missed Call Follow-Up: Why ‘Not Yet Decided’ Leads Matter

Beyond answering calls and quick follow-ups, a major challenge for practices is visibility, that is, knowing what happens on those calls. You can’t improve what you can’t see. Many offices have little insight into call outcomes. This is where call tracking and analytics are game changers. A closer look at call data often reveals eye-opening insights. For instance, not every answered call results in a booking. Patients call for all sorts of reasons and may hang up without scheduling. They might be price-shopping, evaluating options, confirming insurance coverage, or they tried to book a time that wasn’t available. These are not outright refusals; they’re potential patients hanging in limbo. In a typical practice, such outcomes often vanish into a black hole. In reality, those “not yet decided” callers might just need a nudge or some follow-up to convert them into scheduled patients. If you lack visibility, you’d never even know how many leads were in this gray zone.

Call visibility means being able to track and quantify these situations. In VoiceStack, such a call might be tagged, indicating that the patient hasn’t scheduled yet and requires follow-up. Why is this important? Because it lets your team proactively reach out rather than passively hoping they call again. Perhaps the patient needed to check with a spouse or verify insurance; a quick callback from your office could answer their questions and win them over. With a proper system, these pending leads become visible tasks, not forgotten conversations. In fact, VoiceStack’s dashboard presents every incoming lead as a card moving through stages, from Pending Follow-up to Converted or Not Converted, giving you a full pipeline view. Staff can filter by tags, for instance, all the “Not Yet Decided” cases and why they haven’t booked the appointment. Armed with that information, you can take targeted action, like offering an alternate appointment time or a financing option to turn that “maybe” into a “yes.”

Moreover, visibility isn’t just about fixing problems; it’s about measuring success and ROI. For example, when you track every call and its outcome, you can directly see how many new patients came from which calls, which marketing campaigns are truly paying off, and which staff members convert the most calls.

Practices using advanced call analytics have found that they can recover roughly 20% of otherwise missed opportunities by identifying and following up on those “not booked yet” calls.

One case study saw a practice recover 21% of missed opportunities in a month just by timely follow-ups. Across many offices, this translated to an average $20 return for every $1 spent on marketing. In short, making the unseen seen has a direct financial payoff.

How VoiceStack Uses AI to Reduce Dental Missed Calls and Convert More Appointments

Today’s phone solutions are designed to ensure that missed calls, slow follow-ups, and invisible opportunities become a thing of the past. Modern dental phone systems like VoiceStack act like a 24/7 intelligent assistant for your front desk, handling the routine tasks instantly and flagging the important details for your team. Here are some of the game-changing capabilities automation and AI bring to dental practices:

• Never Miss a Call: Advanced call routing and AI receptionists can answer or re-route calls so that virtually 100% of calls get answered, versus the ~78% industry average answer rate. Even after hours or when your staff is busy, the system can pick up, greet the patient, and handle basic queries or forward the call appropriately. This means no patient reaches a dead end. Practices using VoiceStack report drastically higher answer rates, which directly translates into more booked appointments.
• Instant Missed-Call Alerts: If a call does go unanswered, the system immediately alerts your team and logs the details. The moment someone hangs up, a notification pops up with who called, when, and the call purpose. There’s no more digging through voicemails or sticky notes wondering whom to call back, your staff knows right away and can return the call while the lead is still hot.
• Auto-Texts to Save the Day: Automation can send a quick, friendly text message to any patient whose call wasn’t answered. For example, “Hi! Sorry we missed your call, we’ll reach back out ASAP. Your call is important to us.” This might seem minor, but it’s hugely reassuring to patients. Instead of feeling ignored, they immediately know you care and will follow up. It buys you goodwill and a bit of time to get back to them before they call another practice.
• Automated Follow-Up Tasks: Modern systems don’t rely on humans to remember every follow-up, they automatically create tasks for your team. For instance, if a patient’s call didn’t end in a booking, the AI flags it for the staff, with context and a reminder to call back. Each missed opportunity becomes an actionable to-do, not a forgotten memory. This ensures your team systematically works through all those “not booked yet” leads. No more, “I thought someone else would call them back”, the system makes ownership and next steps clear.
• Visual Voicemail & Intelligent Response: When patients do leave voicemails, AI steps in to help there too. Voicemails are automatically transcribed into text for quick reading, saving your team from playing phone tag with the answering machine. Even better, the system can understand the voicemail’s intent and trigger appropriate responses. For example, if a patient says “I chipped a tooth, need an appointment,” the system can mark it as Urgent and alert the team to call back immediately. This way, patients feel heard and you save time by getting the gist at a glance.
• AI Call Analysis and Training: AI doesn’t just stop at connecting calls; it learns from them. Systems like VoiceStack use AI call scoring to rate calls and identify areas for improvement. They might notice, for instance, that certain questions often stump your receptionist or that calls about a specific service aren’t converting well. These insights help you coach your team. These AI-driven call insights help train their team, optimize performance, and guide smarter decisions in managing calls. Essentially, the system becomes a continuous improvement tool, not just a phone line.
• Integrated Data and Metrics: VoiceStack tie into your practice management software and CRM, analytics tools, etc., this ensures that all your call data becomes part of your overall patient data. You can finally see the full journey from a call to a scheduled visit to treatment and revenue. This means you can measure the true ROI of marketing campaigns and identify bottlenecks in your patient acquisition funnel with precision. The phone system’s dashboard provides real-time metrics like answer rate, average response time and conversion rate of calls to appointments. Having these numbers at your fingertips turns phone management from a guessing game into a science.

The impact of combining all these capabilities is huge. To recall a few statistics, some offices have recovered 20% more new patients by actively tracking and re-engaging missed calls, and others have added up to $100,000 in annual revenue just by converting calls that previously would have been written off. Beyond these numbers, there’s a qualitative change; staff aren’t scrambling blindly or feeling guilty about missed calls, and patients aren’t slipping away unnoticed. Instead, your team operates with a safety net and patients feel valued because the practice is responsive and organized. Perhaps most importantly, patients get a better experience. They aren’t left on hold forever or sent to voicemail black holes. If they miss you, they get a quick text and a prompt callback. When they do reach someone, that team member has context to personalize the conversation. All of this signals to the patient that your practice cares about their time and needs, which is the first step in building trust. Happier first interactions lead to more booked appointments and long-term loyalty.

Conclusion: How Solving Dental Missed Calls Unlocks Real Practice Growth

It’s time to face a tough truth: missed calls, slow follow-ups, and lack of visibility into your phones might be costing your practice more than any marketing campaign can make up for. As Kyle Kazak, Co-founder & CTO of Deploy, emphasized in the recent webinar, “Marketing does its job; phones determine whether that demand actually turns into production.” And Carlos Restrepo reinforced this with examples of practices unlocking significant growth by simply improving how they manage calls.

Start with the basics. Make sure every call is answered or quickly returned, and follow up on those “not yet decided” leads before they go cold. With automation and tools like VoiceStack, you can capture more opportunities, reduce manual errors, and give your front desk the systems they need to succeed. Practices that prioritize call handling see more appointments booked and better patient experiences, without increasing their ad budgets.

If you're ready to stop missing out on patients you've already paid to reach, it's time to act. Book a free demo of VoiceStack today and see how this AI-powered phone solution can turn every call into an opportunity for growth. Don’t let another potential patient slip away, make every ring count.

Book a VoiceStack demo today to learn how precise call analytics can empower your practice to convert more calls into real growth.