The Real Cost of a Missed Call, and How to Actually Think About It

A lot of marketing in this space leans on a stat: some percentage of missed calls, some average appointment value, multiplied into a big number meant to make the problem feel urgent. Those numbers are rarely specific to your practice, and they're easy to be skeptical of, for good reason.

A more useful approach is to work it out yourself, with your own numbers, because the honest answer varies a lot by practice.

Start with how many calls actually go unanswered in a normal week: after hours, during a busy stretch, on a day someone's out sick. Most practices don't know this number off the top of their head, and that's fine. It's usually visible in a phone system's call log if you go looking.

Next, estimate how many of those calls would have turned into a booked consultation if someone had picked up. Not every missed call was going to book. Some were price-shopping, some were wrong numbers. Be honest here rather than generous.

Then multiply by what a booked consultation is actually worth to your practice, factoring in the treatments that typically follow a first visit, not just the consultation fee itself.

That number, worked out with your own figures, tends to be more convincing than any industry average, because it's actually yours. It's also the right number to compare against the cost of covering those calls, whether that's a answering service, an after-hours receptionist, or a tool like Velaire.

The goal isn't to arrive at a scary number. It's to have an honest one, so the decision about whether to fix the gap is based on your practice, not a stat sheet.