#258 Why Your Front Desk is Costing You $100k per Year

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Most dentists don’t realize their front desk is quietly costing them $100,000 a year in lost production. 

In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down the simple math behind missed calls and low phone conversion and shows how to turn 35 new patients into 75 using proven systems. You’ll learn the exact phone scripts, scheduling approach, and AI strategies that boost conversion rates to 70–80%. Backed by real data from SMC and over 1,195 practices, this is a must-watch for anyone serious about dental marketing, new patient growth, and practice management.

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Dental Marketing Goat, the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National - recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

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All right, we are live for another episode. And today we're going to be jumping into how your front desk is costing you$100,000 a year. That is not a fake number. That is the average dental office is losing$100,000 a year in production just from their front desk. And I'm going to give you super simple math on this that you're going to be able to follow, and you will be able to see exactly what I'm talking about. So let's create a hypothetical for math because I know you guys all like math. So let's say that you're getting 100 new patient calls every single month. I'm just using around numbers. I know that number may fluctuate. And those hundred new patient calls are coming in from all of your efforts patient referrals, marketing, whatever it may be. From there, you are missing the average dental office is missing 35% of those calls during normal business hours. Now, I'm not taking into account after hour calls. That's totally different. That's a whole nother category that you're possibly losing. Okay. So out of those hundred calls, new patient calls, you're losing 35 of those. They end up at another dental office because they they get your voicemail, then they call the next office and they schedule there. You never get them back, no matter even if your team follows up, because those people are initially looking for a dental office and they're going to jump in to that office immediately. Okay. So now you have 65 new patient calls that you have an opportunity to get into your office. From there, the average dental office converts around 50% of those. Now, if you're not tracking this, you are in that 50% range. 60% on the high side. So let's say of that 65, you get 35 of those to actually schedule. And then on top of that, you have no shows. I'm not even going to count that. I'm going to assume 100% show up, but they don't. And there's a big reason why we'll cover that in another episode. So right now you're ending up with 35 new patients walking through your door. Total. Now let's break down the lost opportunity. There's 65 new patients that ended up somewhere else because you didn't answer the phone, or when you did, you weren't able to answer their questions. So if you take 65 new patients at$1,500 per year, that's$97,000 every 12 months. And it's just rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. It's a boatload of money. It's a boatload. And I'm not factoring in how much money you're losing from your marketing. So you're also spending money on marketing to generate all those opportunities. And you are losing right around$100,000 every single year. And every month this just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling. So there's two ways to fix this. Two ways to fix this. Number one is you have AI answer your phones. Now I know how a lot of people feel about that. Oh, lose human connection and da da da da. Well, you want to know what else loses human connection? Sending patients to the voicemail or a front desk that doesn't know how to answer basic questions. And that's most of the dental industry right now. That's the majority. If you're listening to this, you fit into that category. And so what you can do is you can have AI take the calls. It answers 100% of them. So you get 100 new patient calls. AI will not miss any of them. It answers 100% of them. It'll never miss a call. Plus, it gets the after-hour calls. Okay? And then it's going to schedule at 75%. Maybe a little bit lower, maybe a little bit higher, but that's so far of all of our clients that are using it, all the people that were looking at the data, it's floating between 70 and 80%. Pretty good. Pretty good, especially considering the average humans at 50%. So how many new patients do you have walked through your door now? 75% on those same numbers, right? And this is relative to the size of your office, all that kind of stuff. So 75. So you just 2x your new patients simply by answering the phone 100% of the time and bumping your conversion by 25%. You say, how much does that cost me to have AI that does that for me? That helps me maybe potentially double my new patients. It doesn't like cost much. 200 bucks, 300 bucks, right? It's relatively cheap and in in the big scheme of things, right? When you compare it to everything else. And you're not losing any marketing opportunity. So there's there's all kinds of things that that can do for you. But I know some people that's not going to work for some PMSs won't allow integration, those kind of things. So the other option is to train your front desk. Now, what do we train our team on? Oh, by the way, if you want that link down below of the uh AI, it's down below. You can fill out a form and get into a demo for that. Okay. So let's talk about training your team. Now I have this all in training and I have it in video LMSs. So if you say, man, I really want that for my team, just comment training down below, and we'll get that to you. So what do you need to train to make sure that your team is converting on the phone? Number one, their tone. Tone is super important. And I have a whole training on this. Smile while you dial. You can literally tell if someone's smiling why they're on the phone. Most front desk people are busy, they're spread thin, they're stressed out, and they got a lot of stuff going on. So what ends up happening is they actually come across kind of rude. Don't believe me? Call 10 dental offices in your area and ask basic questions. Do it. I dare you to. Watch what happens. Front desk in the dental offices are typically rude. Customer service is really, really bad in most dental offices, especially on the phones at the front desk because they're spread so thin. Okay, so tone is the first thing that we train on. Next is scheduling. Now, believe it or not, if you actually try to schedule patients up front instead of qualifying them, you schedule more of them. So what a lot of front desks do is they weed out patients. And they do it, they really are lowering their own work, right? So if you have 40 new patients coming in, or if you have 60 new patients coming in every month, 60 more new patients is a boatload more work for the front desk. Do you realize that? Like it's a lot more work. And typically, there's no upside for them. It's just more work, more busyness, more craziness. So you want to know what's really easy to do as a front desk person when you're already spread really thin? Just weed out new patients. You say, How do you know that, Gary? How do you know front desks are doing that? I actually listen to the phone calls. I listen to thousands and thousands and thousands of phone calls, month after month, year after year. I've been doing it for over 10 years. Every single day, every single week, we listen to phone calls constantly. And this is a big problem. Most dentists don't even realize that it's there, they don't see it. So that's the second thing that we train on is just try to schedule them. Just like right out of the box. Hey, thank you so much for calling. Uh, who do I have the pleasure of speaking with? Great. Susan, uh, would love uh what what do you do? You know, what's the purpose of your call today? Are you gonna be a new patient? Yep. Okay, great. What worked better for you to get in, mornings or afternoons? That's it. Like you do that, you'll start scheduling more new patients. But then from there, patients are gonna have a couple questions. And it the two hardest ones to deal with, and I'm gonna do a whole separate show on this, is insurance and pricing. And pricing's simple. Oh, great question. Do you know what the bone density is like in that area? Do you know how many roots the tooth has? Is the tooth impacted? No, you don't know that. That's okay. We got a consultation, we'll get you in, doctor will look at you, we'll know exactly what's going on and give you exactly the price that it's gonna cost. Really, without that information, no one can give you accurate pricing. We would just be guessing over the phone, and you won't get anything accurate from that. That works 90% of the time. There's 10% that are like, oh, I just want the price. Typically, those are other offices just shopping for prices. But it does happen. Okay, so then you have to deal with the insurance question. Now, here's here's the honest truth. Most offices are like, oh, insurance. Insurance is bad. I don't want insurance. It's the first question that every office asks on the phone. First question. Oh, do you uh what insurance do you have? Do you have insurance? Oh no, or yeah, I do, but why why are you leading with that? It is not the most important thing, it is the least important thing. The only thing that really matters is if like if they're in like a state insurance or something like that and they're expecting stuff for free, or some like union insurances are super weird on the East Coast. Other than that, doesn't matter. We're here to help you, and we don't treat insurances, we treat the patient because the dental insurances are just really coupons, they're just like a little bit of a treatment coupon. And honestly, you we need to figure out what's going on and figure out what's gonna be best for you. So if you lead with that, with insurances, you're gonna have a lot of insurance-focused people. If you lead with we take care of patients, you're gonna have a lot of patients that are like, man, I want to be taken care of. So that is the trick to fixing the$100,000 every single year in production that you're losing on the phone. It's not hard. Right? It's not hard. It's not hard to understand. I think anybody can wrap their brain around it. However, I do think that it is hard to hold the team accountable when they're spread thin. And that's what officers struggle with. So if you want the training, comment down below. We're happy to get that to you. Or if you want the AI, it's already down below. Thanks so much for tuning in today.