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How Betsy uncovered lost new-patient opportunities behind an otherwise strong call-answer rate
Signature Dental Partners supports over 100 dental offices across multiple regions. Each office has its own front office team, phone number, and way of answering calls. Melody Bennion leads training and integrations for the group. Each week, she audits calls across its offices to understand how teams communicate with patients and help coordinators improve how they engage patients during difficult conversations.
New patients were getting put on hold and disappearing from the pipeline
Signature’s front office teams were doing what good teams do: focusing on the patients standing in front of them. But that commitment to in-office care was creating an unexpected blind spot. A new patient would call, ask to book an appointment, and because the team was busy helping someone in the office, get placed on hold. Sometimes no one ever made it back to them.
Signature already tracked call answer rates across every location. But the KPI had a blind spot: once someone picked up, the call counted as answered, even if a new patient was placed on hold and eventually hung up. It showed whether the phone was answered, not whether the patient was actually helped.
As Melody reviewed calls one by one, she kept hearing the same pattern. But the manual process could only surface individual examples, and she needed to understand the true scale of the problem across the organization.
“I’d hear, ‘Hi, I’m a new patient, I’d like to schedule for me and my spouse, or me and my family.’ And then, ‘hold please.’ And then five minutes. Nine minutes. I even saw one that was twenty-nine minutes.
This patient hung on with us for twenty-nine minutes, and no one got back to them. So, I started asking Betsy, ‘How many calls where a patient identifies as a new patient, are we putting on hold, and then losing?’”
Melody Bennion
VP of Training and Integrations
Betsy revealed the true scale of the problem
With Betsy, Melody could move from individual examples to an organization-wide answer. Betsy analyzes recorded calls across every Signature location running Fiona and lets Melody ask questions about them in plain language. Instead of manually reviewing more calls, building a report, or waiting on an analyst, she asked how many callers identified themselves as new patients before being placed on hold, how many hung up before the team returned, and how often that pattern occurred across the group.
Betsy searched five months of calls across thousands of recordings and returned the exact population Melody was looking for: new patients who had been placed on hold and hung up before anyone returned. In a single pass, a pattern Melody had only been able to recognize anecdotally became a measurable problem across the organization.
That evidence gave Melody what she needed to build a business case. By combining the calls Betsy identified with Signature’s new-patient economics, she estimated that the pattern represented millions in potential lost revenue each year and brought the finding to senior leadership that same week.
“I’ve listened to a lot of calls, but I was just stunned. I knew we were losing patients to poor call handling, but I had no idea about this — losing the call before we could even start the conversation. I don’t think anyone had realized the potential impact of losing the patient before we start talking. That’s a silent killer.”
Melody Bennion
VP of Training and Integrations
Signature Dental Partners
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The finding gave Signature a clear place to investigate
Signature is still evaluating what should change, but Betsy gave the team a much clearer place to focus. The findings point to two areas worth exploring: whether front-office teams need more support handling new-patient holds and whether Fiona could play a larger role in answering calls before patients are left waiting. The next step is still being determined, but Signature can now make that decision based on patterns across thousands of calls, not isolated examples.
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