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RESOURCES · DENTAL · REVENUE

The true cost of a missed call in a dental practice.

Gateway Global, the makers of Prime Assist · A five-minute read · Last reviewed:

Ask a practice manager what a missed call costs and the honest answer is usually: nobody knows. The phone rang, nobody answered, and the story ends there. What happens next is not recorded anywhere.

Suppliers love to fill that gap with big round numbers. We will not, because we hold no evidenced figure for how many of your callers hang up rather than leave a message, and we know of no published one. What we can give you is a method that runs on your own numbers, which is more useful anyway.

The arithmetic of an unanswered phone

You need four figures. You already have three of them, and the fourth is your judgement. They are the same four the missed-call calculator asks for.

Calls on a typical weekday. Your phone system logs this. If it does not, that is a finding in itself, and a good reason to look at your telephony before anything else.

The share you miss. Count engaged tones, rings that gave up, and everything that landed on voicemail outside opening hours. Do not leave out the out-of-hours share: it is easy to overlook, and it can be the largest part.

The share of those calls that wanted a new appointment. Some unanswered callers wanted to book; the rest were existing patients with questions, wrong numbers and suppliers. We know of no published figure for this, so if you are not sure, choose a low share.

What a new patient appointment is worth. Your own fee for a new patient exam or first visit, from your practice management system. The first visit only, not the course of treatment.

Multiply them: calls on a typical weekday × 5 working days × 52 weeks ÷ 12 × share missed × share wanting a new appointment × value of a first visit.Note 1: where the figures come from The result is not lost revenue, and we are careful about that distinction. It is revenue exposed to the queue each month: the value of first appointments that depended on somebody answering.

If the calls were for NHS urgent care

NHS England’s figure for an urgent course of NHS dental treatment is £75 from 1 April 2026.Note 1: where the figures come from If the unanswered calls you are counting were patients needing urgent NHS care, use £75 as the value instead of your own fee, as the calculator lets you. Our guide to handling urgent dental calls explains what changed and what reception should capture.

Run your own numbers

The missed-call calculator does the multiplication for you and shows its working. Every input is yours, and the method note is printed next to the result. If the number surprises you, the fix is simple to test: book a 30-minute demo and hear Prime Assist answer a live call. See how Prime Assist books new patients into Dentally, or read more about Prime Assist for dental practices.

Three ways to test us. Only one of them involves talking to a human.

Buying voice AI on a slide deck is how people end up with something that fails on the first awkward caller. So we made the product itself easy to try before you commit to anything.

TAKES A MINUTE

Hear it for yourself, right now

Ring the line, choose a scenario, for example a dental practice or a trades business, and talk to Prime Assist the way one of your callers would. Ask it to book you in, then try to catch it out. No form and no email address.

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TAKES TWO MINUTES

Put a number on your missed calls

Two questions show the calls you miss today next to the same calls with Prime Assist, where every call is answered at once. Add your own figures to see what they are worth, what answering them would cost from £150 a month including VAT, and how many of your bookings that price equals.

Run my numbers

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Watch it handle your calls

Bring the three calls that waste the most of your team’s day. We run them live, in your sector’s language, and tell you honestly which ones we would not take. One short form to book.

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Do all three, in that order, and it takes a little over half an hour in total. We would rather you tested the product than read our claims about it.

Notes

  1. Every figure in this article is yours, apart from the calendar constants of 5 working days a week and 52 weeks a year, and NHS England’s £75 figure, from Preparing for NHS dental quality and payment contract reforms, published 3 March 2026 and updated 11 March 2026. We do not publish invented statistics. Back to text, note 1, mention 1Back to text (2), note 1, mention 2
  2. New customer offer: 12 months for the price of 9. When you sign, you commit to all 12 months, starting on the day you go live. Months 1 to 3 are free, then you pay your bundle price each month for months 4 to 12, from £150 including VAT (£125 plus VAT), with the price before VAT fixed for your 12 months. On 500 minutes, the bundle for your 12 months costs £1,350 including VAT (£1,125 plus VAT), plus any extra minutes, at 36p a minute including VAT (30p plus VAT) in every month, free months included. For new customers, switchers included, once per customer. A new customer is a practice or business that has not used Prime Assist in the 24 months before it signs. Switching? We do the switch, and a notice period of up to three months runs alongside your free months. Full terms on our pricing page. Back to text, note 2