Lifted captured new-patient bookings by 22% across two sites.

Riverside runs two busy dental sites, each with a small front-desk team doing the impossible: checking patients in, taking payments, answering treatment questions — and fielding a phone that never stops. At peak times, roughly a third of calls simply could not be picked up. After hours it was worse: the voicemail box filled, and would-be new patients moved down their search results to a practice that answered.

Practice Manager Hannah Clarke knew calls were being missed; what changed things was measuring it. A month of call-log analysis showed the scale — hundreds of unanswered calls across the two sites, clustered exactly at the times the desk was busiest. Worse, a mystery-shopper exercise showed that a new patient who reached voicemail almost never rang back. The practice was paying to attract patients its phone line was quietly turning away.

Our audit mapped the full journey of a Riverside phone call: what patients rang about, which calls genuinely needed a human, and how bookings flowed into the practice calendar. Around two-thirds of call volume turned out to be bookable or answerable without touching the front desk — appointments, reschedules, opening hours, treatment basics. That became the deployment target, with a written projection delivered within 48 hours.

We deployed an AI receptionist connected directly to the practice calendar across both sites. It answers every call in a calm, professional voice, books and reschedules appointments in real time against live availability, answers routine questions about treatments and pricing, and captures new-patient enquiries at any hour. Anything clinical or sensitive is routed to the team with a full summary — the receptionist handles reception, not dentistry.

Go-live was staged: the AI took overflow and after-hours calls first, so the team could review its work before handing over more. Hannah's team read the call summaries each morning — including the Sunday-evening new-patient bookings that had simply never existed before — and within a fortnight the receptionist was answering front-line calls at both sites, with the desk free to look after the patients physically in front of them.

Captured new-patient bookings are up 22% across both sites, appointment cover runs around the clock, and the third of calls that used to go unanswered now gets picked up on the first ring. The front-desk team hasn't been replaced — it has been relieved. The phones stopped winning.