Summit Dental · Healthcare · 2025
An AI receptionist that answers every call and books the appointment
Custom AI call handling and a website chatbot for a three-location dental group, trained on their own policies and connected to their booking system, so no call goes unanswered and the front desk gets its mornings back.
- Services
- AI call handling
- Website chatbot
- Workflow automation
- 97% of calls answered, up from 61%
- +34% appointments booked
- 11 hrs front-desk time saved per week
The brief
Summit’s three practices shared one problem: the phone. Mornings and lunchtimes buried the front desk, after-hours calls went to voicemail that nobody returned, and a mystery-shopper exercise found that four in ten new-patient calls were never picked up. Every missed call was a patient who booked somewhere else.
What we did
- Listened first. We transcribed two weeks of calls and sorted them. Three quarters were about six things: hours, insurance, whether a treatment was offered, directions, rescheduling and new-patient booking. That list became the scope.
- AI call handling. A voice agent that answers on the second ring, in the practice’s own tone, handles the six common requests end to end, and books or reschedules straight into the practice management system. Anything outside its brief, clinical questions, upset callers, anything about pain, is handed to a person immediately with a summary, or scheduled for a call-back with a promised time.
- Website chatbot. The same brain on the website and over SMS, answering from the practice’s actual policies rather than the internet, with a one-tap “book now” at the right moment.
- Guardrails and testing. A test set of 400 real conversations the system has to pass before any change goes live, a hard rule that it never gives clinical advice, and a weekly review of every hand-off.
- Automation. Appointment confirmations, insurance-card reminders and recall messages, triggered by the booking system rather than by someone remembering.
The outcome
Answered calls went from 61% to 97%, including evenings and weekends. Booked appointments rose by a third in the first quarter without any change to advertising. The front desk now spends its mornings with the patients in the building, and the practice manager reads a one-page weekly summary of what the AI handled, what it handed off, and why.
“I was worried patients would hate talking to a robot. The complaints we get are from people who want to know why their doctor’s office doesn’t have one.”
— Practice Manager, Summit Dental