How automation is rescuing dental practices from front desk burnout and messy intake processes

Ryan Johnson: The way that we look at it, certainly in the beginning is missed call rate. You'd be surprised at a lot of these practices, like the first thing to go and look at comparing it to humans is what is that missed call rate throughout the day. One of the research that we did just in healthcare, so this is in dental, but they have a 32% missed call rate for incoming calls, which is one of the highest in the small and medium business industries.

Ryan Johnson: So solving that is a good first step.

Michael Arias: Welcome to the Dental Marketer. This is your go-to podcast for diving deep into the world of business, marketing, self-development, and dentistry. From Startup Secrets to real. Talk with the pros. We've got it all. So whether you're just starting out or you're deep in years and running your own practice, join us for a mix of success stories, a few learning curves and loads of insights from the brightest in the industry.

Michael Arias: We'll chat, learn, and grow together one episode at a time.

Michael Arias: When was the last time you checked to see how many missed calls you were getting in a day? How many did you get yesterday? What about last week? What about last month? See, if you're paying and you're doing marketing, but your phone goes to voicemail, then you're not marketing. You're donating ad dollars to the practice down the street, because here's the brutal truth, most practices don't lose new patients to competition.

Michael Arias: They lose them. To missed calls and messy intakes and slow follow-ups, and it's not because your team is lazy, it's because the front desk is trying to do so many jobs at once. They're checking someone out, verifying insurance, answering questions. They're even calming and upset patient. They're doing all that, and all that is happening while a perfect new patient call is coming in at 12:17 PM but it dies.

Michael Arias: In the voicemail or it dies while it's on hold. So in this episode I brought on Ryan Johnson from CallRail. Now Ryan has spent over a decade living in call tracking attribution and conversation data, and we're gonna expose what most never really actually measure. Which is the real red flags inside your missed calls, the exact moments phone conversions break, and how AI is changing the game, not as a robot receptionist, but as a safety net that capture leads, qualifies them and routes them the right way to you and your team.

Michael Arias: And we're also gonna hit the uncomfortable stuff. Does voicemail really work or is it just a graveyard where phone conversations or missed phone calls go to die? We also discuss why we call them back. When we say that, Hey, yeah, we'll just call them back a little later. That's costing you more than you think, and we also discuss the exact data behind why patients don't convert.

Michael Arias: We're not talking theory here. We're talking real call data, real patterns, and a practical way to fix them using AI as support, not as a replacement. So without further delay here is Ryan Johnson. Ryan, how's it going this week?

Ryan Johnson: It's great. How are you?

Michael Arias: I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for asking. Before we get into our conversation and into AI and call conversions and the data, I wanted to ask why should a practice owner or dentist trust your perspective on phone conversions or what we're about to discuss with AI and phone data?

Michael Arias: What have you seen or measured that most people in dentistry haven't?

Ryan Johnson: I think it's a great question to start the conversation. I think first off. CallRail has been around for almost 12 years now. So like when we thinking about attribution and what's happening on the phone call, things like conversation intelligence, analyzing those things, like this is not new territory for us.

Ryan Johnson: And so we're really building all of these amazing AI capabilities, unlike challenges that we saw dental practices having before. Things like missed calls. Things like not being able to automatically qualify like the best leads. And so really we're using all those many years of experience and data as a springboard to really introduce these things in AI that can help reduce those missed calls, improve marketing performance, and at the end of the day, generate more revenue for these dental practices.

Michael Arias: Yeah, originally, I guess CallRail started out with like call tracking, right? State analytics.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah, so like the genesis was really trying to solve problems for SMB. So call tracking had been around for the enterprise, but for an SMB, like a dental practice, whether it's like a really small one or like multiple locations.

Ryan Johnson: We realized that hey, people spend hard earned marketing dollars online, whether that's, Google or social or whatever it may be. And if you depend on inbound phone calls, tracking that online to offline conversion was critical, and that's where it really started there. And then it evolved over time to tracking additional channels.

Ryan Johnson: Like SMS and form tracking About 2016, we started doing the very earliest versions before AI was cool of a conversational intelligence. So just seeing what people are talking about on the phone and being able to detect a keyword, oh, they said new appointment, or they said cavity or they said tooth replacement technology was not that great back then.

Ryan Johnson: But we've been trying to analyze that data as like the next kind of evolution of intelligence to really help the practitioners and the practices. And then, fast forward today, using the latest and the greatest like AgTech AI to help them.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. All right, so this is gonna be a really special episode because we're gonna uncover the data, look at the mistakes a lot of practice owners are making over the phone, and then give them the exact formulas on what they can be doing to improve that.

Michael Arias: And so if we're listening and we're like. Man, we're doing that. This is a really good episode for that. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, what are the top reasons practices lose new patients on the phone from the data that you've seen?

Ryan Johnson: The biggest one is certainly missed calls. So if they're not picking up at all, that's like the lowest hanging fruit, right?

Ryan Johnson: And whether that's. Because of their business hours. We know a lot of practices, certainly mine here in Atlanta, Georgia, like they're not open on Monday. So if you call them, you may be going to voicemail or you may not get to talk to anybody. So certainly massive opportunity that can be lost that traditionally folks have focused on maybe a call service or voicemail.

Ryan Johnson: I think beyond that, it's the experience that they have on the phone, whether it's with someone at the front office, taking intake questions, doing that efficiently, and being able to do that again with some of these practice. People have multiple roles. They're checking somebody out while they're answering the phone call.

Ryan Johnson: They don't want to be rude so they don't pick up the phone call. Again you're missing those opportunities. And then certainly if you are, a human, and I know we're gonna talk a lot about the AI side, but if you're using agentic technology. Putting it in place to really make sure that experience is better than what they've had before.

Ryan Johnson: Whether that was with a answering service or voicemail. Can it answer questions? Can it actually book an appointment for them? Can it get them the information they need so that every single lead that comes into that dental practice is not lost and it is optimized. And being able to pull intelligence out of that as well to say these are the best leads that come in.

Ryan Johnson: And being able to make other strategic decisions on that. It could be. When you have your office hours, it could be when you have your front office staff, their hours, versus utilizing technology. So there's a lot of like post call analytics that you can utilize too to improve those things, certainly on your marketing performance spend, but then also how you're running the business operationally when it comes to these leads that are, dialing into your practice.

Michael Arias: Interesting. So you mentioned something right now what? What does that mean? Genta? It was a specific term,

Ryan Johnson: a gentech ai.

Michael Arias: There you go. What is that?

Ryan Johnson: In the most generic sense, it's utilizing AI to have an interaction with something or someone. So you could build, in our case a CallRail. We use a Gentech AI to have a voice agent be able to answer the phone call when you can't, or to be able to do intake and those types of things.

Ryan Johnson: Can also happen over SMS. So text messaging, it could happen on websites with chat. So that's one version of Agen ai. Other versions are having these agents do tasks for you. So outside of our realm, you can now design these agents that say, Hey, go do research for me about X, Y, Z, and come back when you have that research and maybe do additional things or.

Ryan Johnson: Automatically follow up on these leads for me in different ways. So I use that as like the most generic term, how you read about it in the news, how you apply it in your daily personal life. There's fun things I do as the chief product officer where I have. Agents go out and do research for me so that I don't have to do the traditional Google search or Google alerts I used to do.

Ryan Johnson: Every single morning it goes out and tells me, Hey, what's happening in the space of voice AI for our SMB, customer base, whether that's dental practices or other healthcare practices or home services, or those types of things. So it takes a lot of that burden off so that I'm getting the rich, information and focusing my time on that versus the administrative side.

Michael Arias: You know what's interesting? Most practices don't have a marketing problem. They have a phone leak problem, like you can be running great Google ads, great SEO, great referrals, but if the call hits at 6:05 PM or during lunch or while your front desk is checking someone out. That new patient turns into a voicemail and what Ryan just said is the part that should mess with our heads a little bit.

Michael Arias: You don't have to spend another dollar to find new patients. You just have to stop losing the ones already trying to reach you. That's why CallRail built Voice Assist. It's not a robot that answers calls. It's more like a front office safety net. That can, number one, pick up after hours or overflow. Two, ask your intake questions the way you want them asked.

Michael Arias: Three, qualify the lead. That means the new patients insurance, urgency, time preference, and et cetera. And four, it can route it so your team follow ups. With the right people first. Here's the curiosity test. If you hold five missed calls from last week, how many were first time callers and how many of those ended up booking anywhere?

Michael Arias: That's the gap. Voice Assist is designed to close, so if you want to see it in action, check out call Rail's, voice assist page. It's in the show notes below. You can go in the show notes below. Click on the first link in the show notes below, and just explore what it can capture and how practices roll it out.

Michael Arias: Starting after hours first. Alright, let's get back to Ryan because we're about to get into the exact red flags to look for and how to use the data to fix it. So then if a dentist listening today, a practice owner, let's go with missed calls, like they pulled five random missed calls from last week.

Michael Arias: What's specific data points or red flags? Should they look for that, tell them this is where they're bleeding new patients? Obviously they're missed calls. Yeah, but what are we looking at specifically besides that?

Ryan Johnson: So I think first off is you mentioned it, are they new? Are they first time callers? They're first time callers.

Ryan Johnson: That's an opportunity, right? Like you don't know. Is it an emergency? Is it just a regular appointment they're trying to set up? But that's new. Revenue, a new patient to your practice. And so if you know this is, just general from a call tracking perspective that this is a first time caller, that's a big red flag.

Ryan Johnson: I would say. The second red flag to that is if even they're a repeat caller, they could be calling for that follow-up appointment or they have an emergency and you don't know what their actions may be next. So I think really the basic data foundation is. First time caller, repeat caller. And then I think the yellow flags are what time of day is that happening, right?

Ryan Johnson: Is it happening during business hours? Is it happening over lunchtime? Is that happening after hours? And really starting to analyze that because. Practice, many of 'em, it's listen, they're eight to five, seven to six, but what happens at 6 0 5? There's lots of different people in lots of different industries that they can't call and interact and they need to get service, whether that's a new appointment or a follow up.

Ryan Johnson: And so I'd say those are like the yellow flags to say, Hey, there is a need for your customer base. For whatever reason it could be. Because of the metropolitan or the rural area you're in. But I think those are like the most basic things to say these are really missed revenue, missed opportunities, and you don't have to spend any more money to capitalize on it.

Ryan Johnson: It's just like you have to be able to meet their needs, whether it's answering their questions, booking an employment when someone isn't there, a person, a human to do it for them or helping them in another way just by being able to answer questions or take lead intake, those types of things.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. So being there when they have needs, expect that their needs are being met right then and there a thing. Convenience. So then I know you mentioned Voice assist. Yeah. And so if you can, before we dive into it real quick, in the most simplest form, and if you could also mention the benefits of Voice Assist, but what is Voice Assist?

Ryan Johnson: Voice Assist is call Rail's version of a voice AI agent for these dental practices in our customers. It's there to make sure you never miss a lead. It can be on 24 7, after hours. It can handle overflow, it can handle even when you have a full staff. It can do things like take lead intake based on the questions that you have.

Ryan Johnson: Do you have insurance? Why are you calling? This types of thing. So it can interact with the patient in a very humanistic way, even though it's driven by ai. So they're realistic voices that's sometimes hard to discern from, that everyday consumer sometimes. And being able to qualify those too.

Ryan Johnson: So not only being able to get that information but make decisions to say, Hey, this is a really good lead. You should follow up with them immediately. Or very advanced types of use cases where it's could be after hours, but they really need to speak to the dentist. Right now its an emergency ai. You can train it, voice assist to be like, oh, it's met this criteria.

Ryan Johnson: Michael is really in pain. I'm gonna make sure he can get to the doctor. Versus maybe somebody else that has a billing question or something like, don't interrupt the doctor after hours. And so that's like the real basics. And then you can get into a lot of fun use cases about, being able to give estimates and more information, booking appointments live or via a follow up SMS and those types of things.

Michael Arias: So it's more than just like answering missed calls. And I think that's something that's new. And I guess we can look at this in a different angle is it's not just a way to answer phone calls. It's a whole entire intake system.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah.

Michael Arias: From the moment that like the new patient is calling or the patient, existing patient, whoever's calling all the way to, like their cheeks are in the seats, right?

Michael Arias: Like they're in the operatory, the entire intake system and voice assist does all of that.

Ryan Johnson: And it's totally customizable, right? And depending on the practice, depending on what they want, you basically, either you can do it on your own self-service or you can work with one of our specialists and say, these are the things that I want voice to capture.

Ryan Johnson: I mentioned previously, do they have insurance? Are they a new patient? Do they have time preferences? And it can not only intake that data, it can also start to qualify the data on it. Is this a really good read? So that maybe the next day when you come in oh, I need to call Ryan immediately.

Ryan Johnson: 'cause he has insurance. He just moved to the city, he's six months behind on his cleaning. He needs a full set of x-rays. Let's make sure we follow up with him immediately. But then it doesn't have to live in CallRail. Like you can push that data to your patient management system, to your CRM in a variety of different ways.

Ryan Johnson: If you're, working with an agency or you have more technical chops, you can do all types of fun things that APIs and web hooks in your very customized way, or you can just. Utilize some of our integrations to do that, or somewhere in between with something like Zapier. So you also can live in your system that you want your employees in with that data and not have to feel like you have to always go into CallRail as well.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. Okay. So it sounds like this is like a win, win no matter what. It's. Good all around, but I kind of wanna dive into the human and AI aspect of it, because we see that a lot, especially in forums and things like that, where, it's you call customer service sometimes and it's like a robot answering right?

Michael Arias: Or a bot answering and you're just like, I just wanna speak to a human. And so we feel that maybe that might happen in the same way in dentistry. Some people have seen it that way, some people haven't. So from your data, how do new patient conversion rates look when an AI agent answers versus a human team member?

Ryan Johnson: That's a great question. Right now, we don't have enough, I would say critical data to say from a funnel perspective, a human versus AI does this. I think right now the most important data is if it's not a human, if it's voicemail or other types of things, a patient has almost a six and a half times more likely to interact with that thing than it is to leave a message via voicemail or an answering service.

Ryan Johnson: So dramatically higher when that human isn't there. With humans. There's so much that's in play AI versus human from that intake process. That certainly is data that we're trying to analyze. And once we get to that critical, massive data to say, but there's so many variables in that, how early was that person trained?

Ryan Johnson: How new are they versus ai, how much did you update it? What time of day? What is the true goals that you set up for a voice agent? 'cause it's not always necessarily to capture the lead. It could be for really lead qualification and routing. Because many times I would say, and you mentioned this isn't just about missed calls.

Ryan Johnson: It's about optimizing those patients and those leads that come in. So a wonderful use case we've had some practices do is have voice AI as the first interaction at the front of the house and then route it to the right person with the right skillset. And so if it's, maybe a question about something that they're having an issue with, maybe you want that to go to the doctor.

Ryan Johnson: Maybe you want that to go to the hygienist or whatever it may be, versus here's a new patient appointment, they should talk to a human because the human has the best conversion rate. Versus a repeat patient where they may be totally fine interacting with AI to say, oh, I've been. To Dr. Johnson a bunch of times, I just need to book my followup appointment, or I need to reschedule that followup appointment 'cause something came up.

Ryan Johnson: And as long as that experience is good and they can get to that outcome, I think that's what changes it. And I think. The difficulty today is not everybody has had that wonderful experience yet. Many of them have had that. I would say old school experience where you're caught in a loop. You just want to talk to a human.

Ryan Johnson: And so once you have that delightful experience of oh my gosh, I was just able to set this thing up and. I got the text message and great, or, oh, I actually interacted with it and I gave it all this information, and then I talked with Michael, and Michael got me all set up, so it was the marriage of the two as well.

Ryan Johnson: So it really depends on kind of your practice and your scale and how you want to implement it. There's so many different ways to do it, and I'll say some of it's trial and error, right? You have some areas of the country that are more willing to adopt interacting with AI agents versus humans. You have others that aren't.

Ryan Johnson: It will surprise you though, area codes and rural versus, big cities. There's lots of data even outside of dental practices that say, if the experience is really good, they're willing to work with it. If it's not, of course it's the legacy experience that I think we've all had those frustrations with.

Ryan Johnson: Yeah,

Michael Arias: from the initial beginning. That's a good point. For tracking call conversions, what benchmarks should practice owners compare against to know if their front desk is actually underperforming?

Ryan Johnson: That's a good question. A part of what we see, one is the performance is take voice assist out of it. But just more I would say general conversation intelligence.

Ryan Johnson: Is looking at the performance and utilizing tools that can help you understand and actually give feedback to dental practices about how their front office staff is. And I think the benchmark's gonna be different compared to the practices about, what you look at as like new patient conversion rates and those types of things, or qualifying them.

Ryan Johnson: I think it really, depends on a lot of variables to get to a good benchmark to compare AI to. I think the way that we look at it, certainly in the beginning is missed call rate. I know it's like beating the drum about that, but you'd be surprised at a lot of these practices, like the first thing to go and look at.

Ryan Johnson: Comparing it to humans is, what is that missed call rate throughout the day. I think that's like number one. And we see that, I'm looking at my notes here, but like in general, one of the research that we did just in healthcare, so this isn't dental, but they have a 32% missed call rate for incoming calls, which is one of the highest in the small and medium business industries.

Ryan Johnson: And so solving that is a good first step. Then it gets into the more sophisticated, okay, our. Conversion rate of a human versus AI with appointments and those types of things. But again, there's so many variables to me to say, Hey, a benchmark versus AI is like 50%. It's really hard right now.

Ryan Johnson: I think we'll get better over time and understand that because in reality, sometimes. What the marriage between ai, just getting the right person to the right human, so the right patient to the right human at the right time is the optimal thing to do. So it's not necessarily the AI versus human debate, it's the marriage of the two in the right experience to make that happen.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. I like that. The marriage of the two of them. Interesting. So then with missed calls we've discussed about that. So let's talk about unscheduled treatment now. And this is something that like we really want to dive into, especially with, we have a lot of unscheduled treatment. So how can AI help practices improve, follow up on unscheduled treatment?

Michael Arias: So fewer opportunities slip through the cracks.

Ryan Johnson: One of the data points that we have, again, this is a little broader outside dental, but healthcare, but. We surveyed our customers and they said about 63% said that their top operational like marketing challenge was like the lead follow up for that conversion.

Ryan Johnson: So it's that time to follow up even if you missed it. So if your staff time, like we know that's finite, you can't chase every one of those leads 'cause all leads are not equal. So there's a window of opportunity where the follow-up occurs and you have to capitalize on it. And manual follow-ups, can be, too generic or not mentioned specific things.

Ryan Johnson: So I think the personalization side of it is also really important when it comes to that unscheduled treatment, so that if. They're waiting on a callback at the end of the day for unscheduled treatments. The patient wants to know that they're going to get the care that they need. And so I think that's a really big piece of it, is making sure that you're able to determine that sense of urgency before anything else.

Ryan Johnson: 'cause there's lots of noise, right? And you're getting a bunch of different phone calls, a bunch of different things. So how do you root those out in a good way to be able to act on those? And then how is the experience to follow up with them? If you have massive tooth pain, like you may not want to interact with a voice AI agent for very long.

Ryan Johnson: You just want to talk to the person that's gonna help solve you. And maybe that's after hours. I think that's like the critical piece of it. Is that they're getting the confidence. Your patients are getting the confidence with whatever tools that you're utilizing so that they can get that unscheduled treatment in a timely basis, and that you understand those patients that are coming in and can react to them in a scalable and efficient way.

Michael Arias: Okay, so then can you describe to us how voice assist does this? What's automated, what's personalized? What triggers the follow up?

Ryan Johnson: Sure. So from voice, this is today, some of the follow up can be in how they trained it. So this could be the triggers that the office set up. So you can train it to say, if we get X, Y, and Z, send me an email, send a person an email, or send.

Ryan Johnson: A person that may be on call, a text message with all that information in there, which is great. So from a personalization perspective, you're getting the right information to the right person so that if the human is the person following up, you're not repeating everything again. It already knows. Voice assist said.

Ryan Johnson: Hey, Ryan called, his tooth was hurting. He was eating candy that he shouldn't have, and he had a crown nearby, but he doesn't know if it's the crown that's acting up or something else. And so that personalization coming back is whoever's returning that phone call. They don't have to ask that person for all those types of things.

Ryan Johnson: So you have these triggers. They could be, like I said, email. They could be SMS or they could be things with your patient management system or CRM that you integrate with. I mentioned earlier too, we have SMS with voice assist from a perspective of being able to immediately follow up. So depending on what that person says during the phone call, you could immediately trigger a followup text message for them to set the appointment, and very soon we'll be able to do that on the fly.

Ryan Johnson: So you can just talk to the voice assist agent, basically the AI agent to book the appointment without even getting a text message. So it's really trying to reengage if you've missed it or calling back to make sure that it is personalized with the data you've already captured. You're not repeating things.

Ryan Johnson: And then is it through a channel that you know that person may want to interact with? So that could be SMS, certainly the phone and going from there.

Michael Arias: Interesting. So if someone leaves, say we're like ultra busy or we just forget the front office. Yeah. Someone leaves. With unscheduled treatment or they forget to schedule AI can send a message like as they're walking out, or how does that look?

Ryan Johnson: For voice assistant general with CallRail, it really depends on the interaction with the agent and how you've trained it.

Ryan Johnson: Today, I would say, and I think this is where you're leading it to, we don't do a agent outbound dialing to that person. So if you walked out of the business and for some reason we know, hey, Michael called two days ago, or he called a day ago, or he was just here.

Ryan Johnson: We need to follow up with that. At least right now, we don't have a voice AI agent calling and doing that on behalf of the practice. The way they can reengage is through automated follow up with email on file. It could be it's through their CRM or patient management system that's giving you a trigger from voice assist to do that, to say, Hey, we didn't set this appointment up.

Ryan Johnson: You need to go and do something. So they're getting that signal from us. Or it could be the lead score signal too, right? The lead on the patient's hire or however you configure it. Oh, go do these extra things. We've equ and got to the, Hey, let's have AI call back. It's a little bit of a fine line, right?

Ryan Johnson: We get that feedback from some of the practices, but then we're also looking at. Things in the market of like how comfortable are people interacting with it? It's different when you call in and maybe after hours or during hours and you understand, but getting a call from a voice AI agent, it's a different thing.

Ryan Johnson: And certainly I think some of us have gotten like the automated, follow up appointments for the next day, that we opt into, whether it's SMS or even a phone call and someone leaves a message. But with ai, I think we're trying to figure out where are people comfortable with that, and I think we'll see more of that this year as we get feedback.

Ryan Johnson: The outbound side of it.

Michael Arias: Yeah. Following up is like me personally, I feel like that's where a ton of opportunities miss. Like under the follow-up umbrella. Yeah. Is patient confirmations. Unscheduled treatment. Even marketing when you're trying to call new leads, following up, they didn't show no shows.

Michael Arias: All that is under like the follow up umbrella.

Ryan Johnson: That's right.

Michael Arias: I don't care. No matter what, somebody's gonna drop the ball. One person cannot keep up with all that and be like, a hundred percent. I followed up with everything. So would you say this is a great way to marry the two? Meaning like what you said, marry the two, almost like a safety net where hey, there's nothing that's really leaking through.

Michael Arias: Because if you failed to follow up with, let's just say the leads at this event, or you failed to follow up with this unscheduled treatment and this voice assist can capture that.

Ryan Johnson: We're gonna capture what happened that they asked for. And even if they've talked to a human, you can utilize conversation intelligence to do that and say, Hey, by the way.

Ryan Johnson: You're saying that you're gonna follow up, but did the follow up actually happen? And again, not all leads and not all patients are created equal. We know that. So I think the important part is making sure your highest quality ones like really don't fall through the cracks that get that personalization.

Ryan Johnson: I think that's really where the superpower of this lives today with CallRail. Is whether you are using voice AI to capture that lead and all that rich data to make sure you're doing that and you're getting that signal to say, Hey Michael, it's 8:00 AM. Probably didn't follow up on it last night. 'cause the call came in at six 30 and we did send you the text message to, to do it, but maybe you didn't or the email or maybe you got the trigger.

Ryan Johnson: But hey, by the way, this is like your hot lead. If you do not follow up, this is lost revenue to your practice. That person isn't gonna get the service that they called you for. And so making sure that you know all those in some type of ranked fashion also is really critical too, because volume and all those not being created equal, like getting through that noise is really important too.

Ryan Johnson: So even if you're not using voice assist, using conversational intelligence to analyze. Even the conversations that are happening to say, Hey, these aren't being followed up on in the right way, and there's tools that you can use inside a CallRail to automatically do that. Like after a phone call is done or a text message has been completed, we can actually automatically generate the follow up email that says, Hey, we talked about this.

Ryan Johnson: Here are your next steps. You need to do this. And it just sends right after the front office person, they don't have to do anything. What Paul Rail can just do that after the fact. And it's very customized, certainly for healthcare and dental practices. There's no PII or any of that stuff. So it's intelligent enough to say, Ooh, don't mention exactly X, Y, and Z in this follow-up email or this follow-up text message, but make sure it's customized so that person's wow, like I literally just got off the phone with Michael.

Ryan Johnson: And now I have a summary of everything we've talked about and my next steps, like That's great. It's a wonderful experience as a consumer and as a patient.

Michael Arias: Yeah, it really is. That's it. That's incredible too. Now, I know voice assist was out for a moment and we were super pumped to talk about it. Yeah. But you were like, Hey, we gotta get that hipaa, like it has to be supported.

Michael Arias: Exactly. That's

Ryan Johnson: right. And so

Michael Arias: talk to me about that. What is the difference that you've seen now? Where it's Hey, one is supported by HIPAA and another service is not. Is there something specific that we need to look at when we're looking at it?

Ryan Johnson: One of the biggest challenges with a lot of this, I'll even take a setback with AI technology is it's evolving so fast.

Ryan Johnson: It's coming to market so fast, it's easy to use. And I think a lot of industries, especially in the dental industry and healthcare industry, there's a lot of hesitancy because of HIPAA and patient privacy and making sure that all the do's are audited and the T's are crossed with that. And so before, I was like, I'd love to talk about all this stuff.

Ryan Johnson: We got a lot of feedback from our dental practice customers that we already have to say, Hey, like I'm sorry, like we would love to utilize voice assist, but if we don't have. The HIPAA compliance that we're used to with CallRail, like we just can't do it. We can't take the risk, and in many cases the risk is higher because.

Ryan Johnson: Some companies are building on top of systems, you don't really know where that data goes, right? And so that's what a lot of people talk about. So for us, one is we wanna make sure we're in compliance with these dental practices, making sure we have a B, a, A, and giving that outline, making sure that.

Ryan Johnson: All the PHI is protected, making sure that US and CallRail, we've built on top of our basically HIPAA platform that we've done in the past to make sure the data is encrypted, things are restricted to the customer, like most importantly, with this data, the biggest question that people have are, Hey, are you training AI on my data or on my patients?

Ryan Johnson: And the answer is no. That is another piece of it. And that even goes downstream, right? So pretty much all companies that offer this, like we're all built on similar technology, whether that's open AI or Anthropic or perplexity or on and on Google, like we're all using these foundational models.

Ryan Johnson: But what was really important to us is we had to work with a partner that also has HIPAA that would also sign a BAA with CallRail. And so in that case with voice assist, it's open ai. So we also have a BAA with open ai. They have a HIPAA compliance product, and the endpoints and the APIs we use are specific to that.

Ryan Johnson: So they don't retain any of the data. They don't use any of the data on their training models. For the bigger stuff, it is all separated from everything else. And then as far as CallRail internally, there are things that we do to help people get set up quickly as well too. So the example is when you come in to set up your voice assist agent.

Ryan Johnson: We need information about that, right? So if most of the practices have a website you can enter in your URL. It will go and pull all the information and say, Hey, we know about your dental practice. These are the things that we think voice assist can start talking about and answering, and the hours you have and the services you have.

Ryan Johnson: It can also look back at previous phone calls and say, Hey, we can train on what your people, your humans, are already talking about if you are an existing CallRail customer. And so we make it easy so that the lift for the customer to basically create the agent becomes self-service. Again with hipaa, like we don't use any of that data, any of the privacy data to do that.

Ryan Johnson: It's all genericized and it's all kept to that individual practice, right? It's not shared between practices or between companies. It's all gated to make sure that everything is what our customers have expected. That, call Rails had for many years with hipaa. And that they feel really confident and comfortable that not only CallRail, but all of the providers that we use are that way.

Ryan Johnson: It's the same thing with a lot of the things we do with Conversation Intelligence. Partner with a great company called Assembly AI that does a lot of the speech to text. Same thing out of the gate. We needed the BAA, we needed the HIPAA compliance. It's just a non-negotiable these days. That I'm sure you hear a lot too, like it's pretty rare that you have some of these in healthcare that come out and say I don't really care about hipaa, like I'll figure it out.

Ryan Johnson: So it was really important for us to do it, and it was a very fast follow. After we launched Voice Assist, we knew it was coming. We just didn't know how hard the knocks would be, and they were very hard out of the gate. So I think. We launched Tip maybe six weeks after their original launch. I can't remember, but it was very quick.

Michael Arias: Yeah, it was, it felt wild, but it was quick though. Is exciting. Still

Ryan Johnson: a lot longer than what it is.

Michael Arias: Yeah, it's exciting to put it out there too. So then just in general, Ryan, what are some questions we can ask if we're looking at like other products like that, or similar ones that were like, Hey, is this HIPAA compliant?

Michael Arias: What should I be asking to know that?

Ryan Johnson: Yeah, I think in general, the partners that you're working with, are they willing to do a, B, a, A? A lot of that will say, you can use hipaa. There's variations of the words that you see out there with companies, and you go, oh they're definitely not HIPAA compliant.

Ryan Johnson: They don't meet these standards. So I think one is. When looking at companies like, are they doing the process that you're used to? So if you have a B, A, A, they're like, yep, normal part of HIPAA compliance. I think it's looking at obviously their T's and C's and all the information there. And I think it's looking downstream too, right?

Ryan Johnson: I think it's really important to say, are they working with partners that are also HIPAA compliant? 'cause as we know, it's not just us as CallRail. It's everything else that we touch and the partners we touch. So I think that kind of extra level, if you are a dental practice, looking at any of those tools and it's important to you with that data that you're just asking those questions.

Ryan Johnson: Either you're getting it online or if you are working with someone in the company, really ask those questions. Is it standardized to hipaa? What are other things you're doing too? In CallRail there's things that we can do that go even a step further that aren't up our hipaa. So things like.

Ryan Johnson: Being able to customize redaction. So redacting certain things. We gave you the knobs and dials to do that. To say, oh, if you want to go an extra level beyond hipaa, maybe it's like taking a credit card payment, right? And so things like that where it's oh, like CallRail has something that can even redact the credit card number, not only out of the call recording, but the transcription, and then anything that would go to these downstream systems.

Ryan Johnson: Again, whether you're utilizing voice assist. Whether you're utilizing conversation intelligence, it's looking for those things to make sure that you feel as protected as possible. And this is very new for a lot of these AI companies. They can just move so fast, which is why it's so fun to be in this right now.

Ryan Johnson: But there's a lot of questions that come up with security and training on data and compliance in different ways. And then of course there's the. Whole, where does AI sit in general outside of HIPAA and these other things, like there's lots of question marks about regulation and what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing that even go beyond that.

Ryan Johnson: And so I think it's like just making sure that you're working with a trusted partner and they have all those things that you would expect to have from like a HIPAA or a privacy perspective.

Michael Arias: Interesting. Alright, so then let's talk about growth without ads. If a practice owner or a dentist wanted to add 20 new patients next month without spending more on marketing in general, how could they leverage voice assist to get there?

Ryan Johnson: I love this question. Everybody wants to not spend money on marketing get more, right?

Ryan Johnson: That's the holiday gift that everybody wanted, right? I think there's some low hanging fruit here, and one is making sure that you can capture those leads whenever they come in. So even if you don't spend an extra dollar.

Ryan Johnson: You may or may not know when a person is seeing those ads, right? And so they could see the ad at eight o'clock at night, decide to call you, miss the lead, and so your total marketing spend per lead obviously is different. Now, if you use something like voice assist. You're not missing that lead.

Ryan Johnson: You're capturing it, and so you're not spending an extra dollar in marketing. You're just making sure that everything that's coming through the funnel is being, handled, optimized. I think that's like such a big piece of it, and I think that's like the simple aspect of it, to make sure that there's no leaks in those funnels.

Ryan Johnson: Additionally to that, let's say you're working with an agency. Or you're spending dollars on like LSAs and those types of things. Local service ads, there's things like response time that matter that actually affect your ROA that can reduce your cost per lead and those types of things. So making sure that you utilize voice assist, whether it's, during business hours, after hours, either the call that came in that maybe came from a local service ad or a text message, that those are meeting their criteria.

Ryan Johnson: As far as ad ranking and spend there too. And I think beyond that, as you get more leads, like making sure that it's tailored to getting the right data. So making sure that you're filtering this data back into those. Digital ad platforms. So if you're utilizing Google Ads, making sure that you're feeding the data from CallRail, the lead score, the qualification and conversion signals backed into Google so that you're actually spending less money to say, Hey, these are really good leads.

Ryan Johnson: Send me more of these. Don't send me any of those. So I think this is, three things. You make sure every lead is answered. You make sure they're qualified and that data is getting back to the right systems. And then that each one of these leads is optimized, making sure that they have a really good experience.

Ryan Johnson: And I think if you do that, you don't have to spend an extra marketing dollar. You're just capitalizing on all these things that are already coming through your funnel. That may even be organic as well too.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. Okay. I like that. I like the three features. So if you had to give us an action plan, we're listening to this.

Ryan Johnson: Yep.

Michael Arias: And then Monday, Hey, I'm gonna start it. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna give voice assist. I We're gonna do this. What would week 1, 2, 3, and four look like if it was a 30 day action plan?

Ryan Johnson: Yeah, I love this. So it's like crawl, walk, run, right?

Ryan Johnson: So I would say the first one is you need to get this set up and I would say the like least, risky way to do it so you feel comfortable is set this up for after hours.

Ryan Johnson: Right? And you can. Do this at your own pace to, make sure that you've turned on the voice. A agent has all the context to do what you want it to do. You can actually work with one of our experts that make it go faster and smoother as well. So I think that week one is picking something that you may know is a challenge already, and the risk is fairly low, right?

Ryan Johnson: There is tweaking in here. Is that voice agent doing the right things that you wanted based on what you're trying to have it do. But what we traditionally see is that first week is like after hours there. Either going to a voicemail, it's not a great experience, or they're not being answered at all.

Ryan Johnson: So that's the technology piece. I think the people and process piece is who owns the follow ups, what other systems need to be connected to make sure that these are getting to the right places at the right time, the things that we talked about. So it's just not about the missed call. If you have voice as assist up them running, that's great.

Ryan Johnson: But what happens when someone comes in at 8:00 AM. What's your process to follow up with it? Is it being integrated into the systems you use? So I think that's week one is really getting your feet wet with it. I think week two is you're gonna get a lot of data to understand what's working and what's not to be able to tweak voice assist.

Ryan Johnson: So it could be things like, sometimes practices set up too long of an introduction message and so let's optimize that and let's bring that down to make sure that the customer can just really get into it. It could be about the questions that people are asking. Maybe you didn't tell Voice assist that it could answer these questions, but people keep on calling.

Ryan Johnson: So now it's okay, great, let's make sure that it's optimized for that. And then really making sure that these are all starting to flow through your integrations, whether it's your patient management system, your CRM, your ad platforms. Any of those reporting tools. I'd say another one is those triggers that we talked about.

Ryan Johnson: So if there's things like based on severity, hey, we wanna have a trigger via email or SMS and those types of things. So I think that's what like week two looks like. And then finally week three is kind of plan your next move if everything is working well, is it time to give voice assist more responsibility?

Ryan Johnson: Is it time to open up things? So there's things that you could do to say, Hey, voice assist doing really well after hours. And maybe you know that your ad spend goes down after six o'clock, maybe turn it up. Those leads might be cheaper 'cause your competitors are. Advertising at that time, but now you have voice assist to capitalize on all those leads and possible new patients at times that weren't optimal before.

Ryan Johnson: So you're spending less money on some of these leads and you're getting them during different times. And then I think it's your comfort level of what you're trying to do with your business at that time. During the day where you know you're a smaller practice and you have that one person that's checking people out, answering phones.

Ryan Johnson: Grabbing files, like maybe it's time to put voice assist at the end of week three in front of the house and be that qualifier so it can do that routing for you to say, oh, hey, Michael called, he's a existing patient, put him into the easy bucket to, just schedule his next cleaning. Or, Hey, this is Ryan, like he's a new patient and he really has a problem and here's all this stuff.

Ryan Johnson: Hey, let's make sure that he can talk to someone today. 'cause if he doesn't, he's probably just gonna go to the next, practice that he Googled or whatever it may be. So I think those are like, that probably bleeds into the full months, but that's like the easy way to do it. It's a snowball effect.

Ryan Johnson: I always try to tell people if they take anything away from that, just start small. Just start somewhere. Don't try to solve everything at once. You're gonna learn from it. You're gonna understand how your customers interact with it. Delaying to make sure it's perfect really isn't the way to do it.

Ryan Johnson: It's really to get something small in there. Start to learn and tweak from it, and then it really just snowballs from there. And that's the fun thing that I see with practices. Is, they see their missed call rate, go down on average the first week it reduces it by 22%, like that's an average.

Ryan Johnson: So that's people doing it well, there's people doing it bad. That's like across the board. And I think once they start to see that, it just snowballs. And then you get comfortable with the technology and your patients get comfortable and you figure out where does it fit in our systems, whether it's giving data.

Ryan Johnson: To Google or your patient management system or your CRM or whether it's the marriage with your employees there and how do they basically work together in harmony to get the best outcomes for your patients?

Michael Arias: Ah, interesting. I love the breakdown. Okay, so interesting. I never thought about that too. Where you can give voice assist more responsibility as far as what they're doing.

Michael Arias: So then let me ask you one last questions. What hiccups. Can someone or can I expect to have, so that my expectations are like, this was supposed to be a magic pill. It didn't happen, Ryan, what's going on? So what hiccups can I expect from the human aspect interacting with voice assist?

Ryan Johnson: So I think one expectation is you have to invest some time in it, right?

Ryan Johnson: This is not the easy button. It's not all knowing about your business. Of course, we try to do things like I mentioned before, take your website, get all that data in, help train the agent. But what's unique about these products is you gotta invest some time in it. At least right now, AI doesn't know everything about your business.

Ryan Johnson: It doesn't know your personality, it doesn't know the service that you wanna provide. And so that's really, I think going into it day one mentally is like you're not gonna go in there and push a button. You can push a couple buttons, you can get through it, you can talk to one of our specialists that will vastly accelerate 'cause they just know all this types of stuff.

Ryan Johnson: But I think that's one is like you gotta invest in it. Similar to how you'd have to invest in a new employee right when they come in. You just don't put 'em on the phone and say, Hey, have at it. You gotta invest there. Now the nice thing is it's a lot less investment and AI doesn't forget, right? So I think that's number one.

Ryan Johnson: I think number two is just knowing that you're gonna have to make some tweaks. You may not know exactly what new things start to come into play, where people are having very positive interactions with ai. So they start asking questions that maybe they didn't ask before. And so the voice assist agent may be like, we keep having people ask about this new procedure that they saw online in a TikTok video for teeth whitening or something.

Ryan Johnson: But if the voice agent doesn't have context, if a voice assist doesn't have context, it's just gonna be, Hey, I don't know. I'll make sure to get back to you and all that. You may have to continue to invest a little bit to say, oh wow, all these people are calling about this. Let's make sure we can talk about it.

Ryan Johnson: Oh yeah, Michael, we do that service and this is the starting price for it and do we wanna get you set up for the next appointment of that? So I think that's number two. And then number three is, you mentioned it, the magic pill. People have this perception that AI is perfect and it should be perfect.

Ryan Johnson: And air free and those types of things. It's just new technology. There are gonna be little things that happen that are frankly gonna be outside of your control as well too, right? You could have a caller with, music g layering in the background, and they're like, why did the voice assist?

Ryan Johnson: Not hear everything. We have technology to cancel things out and all that, but all these calls are very unique. It could be a missed connection. It could be someone talking really soft and you can you anything, things like that, right? And so I think there's things that with humans, we give empathy to humans.

Ryan Johnson: Hey, Michael's a new employee that didn't really go well. Let's like retrain him on it. It could be the same way with voice, AI and voice assistance, some of those things, just knowing that Hey, day one, we've done everything. We've worked with you to get it to where we feel comfortable that it's a great representation of your business, it's gonna grow your revenue.

Ryan Johnson: But the technology's still very new. It hasn't been around that long in general, across the board. So I think it's understanding, hey, these things may happen and you may have to react to them. The good thing is over time, and it's accelerating faster than I've ever seen it from a technology perspective, they're being solved quicker than I could ever imagine.

Ryan Johnson: And so things like the background noise, things like people speaking softly, misunderstanding, changing language in the middle of a call, doing things like Spanglish. Those types of things that honestly, like your front office person maybe wouldn't be able to handle that anyway.

Ryan Johnson: But now AI can do those things. It can switch language like mid speaking. And so I think that's what's really important is just. Be excited about it. Have realistic expectations, and it will get to where you want. And especially when you look at the ROI, it's really tough to find people all the time.

Ryan Johnson: It's obviously tough to find, stuff 24 7. And so when you look at the ROI, it's dramatically. Better and it's lower. When you look at comparable services or having to just be able to find talent, sometimes you can't, focusing in on the ROI and the new revenue and those types of things are good and so I think expectations are the biggest thing going there with realistic expectations.

Ryan Johnson: Invest in it. It will do really good for you. And then continue on to that and then you can give it new responsibilities in the future.

Michael Arias: Man, that's incredible insight and incredible information. I never thought about that. Where language changing, mid conver, and I do that all the time with my parents.

Michael Arias: You know what I mean? Like we changed language, Spanglish. Okay. Yeah. Mid conversation, right? And I never thought about that happening on the phone or even being empathetic with AI because we are empathetic with human beings. You know what I mean? As far as I'm sorry, I can't get it. It's it's okay, take your time.

Michael Arias: But whenever it's. AI we're like, Ugh. We're like, do this now, put it

Ryan Johnson: in it's billions of dollars being spent. It should do everything. Like how could possibly go wrong. I think that's like the interesting thing. And I do think listen over time all those things are being worked out, which is really good and like I said, faster than I ever expected, understanding that from the get go is really important.

Ryan Johnson: And that's the challenge. And I think that's the change curve too. People who. Expect to come in and say, Hey, this thing's a hundred percent, day one, or any other service that you use, like really just understand that it goes back to the three week plan. It's a crawl, walk, run thing.

Ryan Johnson: It's just not a light switch necessarily for a lot of the practices. And then you'll figure out what makes sense and how you utilize it and what jobs you give. Inside of your practice.

Michael Arias: Gotcha. Ryan, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. But the final question I wanted to ask you is, what's one question you'd like to ask for the next guest to answer?

Ryan Johnson: What's the most exciting thing this person is looking forward to in the dentistry world? Like we talked a lot about marketing and agen with dentists and those types of things. Regardless of their role and what they do, like what gets them most excited. It could be the technology we use. It could be something that dentists do, but what is that number one thing that people are excited about as we go into 2026 in the industry?

Michael Arias: Gotcha. Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. But before we say goodbye, can you tell our listeners where they can find you or where they can find out more about voice assist?

Ryan Johnson: Sure, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Personally, I love when people reach out and ask me questions and look for help.

Ryan Johnson: So I'm pretty active on there, so feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. As far as voice Assist and CallRail, you can just go to callrail.com. Lots of information there on, on Voice Assist. You can get it set up started for you trial, or you can talk to someone and help them through the process there.

Ryan Johnson: So pretty easy to get started and, risk free. So utilizing those two channels is probably the best.

Michael Arias: Nice. So that's all gonna be in the show notes below. And Ryan, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure, and we'll hear from you soon.

Ryan Johnson: Thanks for having me.

Michael Arias: So if you listen to this and you're thinking, okay, we're definitely missing calls, or maybe you're saying our follow-up is not as tight as I thought it was, or maybe you're saying, Hey, we're paying for.

Michael Arias: And we're not even talking to any of them. And here's the simplest takeaway. You don't need more leads. You need fewer leaks. And that's why I want you to look at call rail's voice assist, because it's not just answering missed calls, it's building a better intake system, the thing that decides whether your marketing turns into booked appointments or disappears into chaos.

Michael Arias: And the smartest way to start is exactly like Ryan laid out. It's number one, just turn it on after hours first. It's the lowest risk and the highest missed call upside. Then number two, customize what it captures. Customize the insurance urgency, new versus existing patients time preference, and so forth.

Michael Arias: Then three set up alerts so your team knows who the hot leads are. And four, decide if you want to handle overflow routing or even appointment booking workflows. So here's the question I want you to sit with. If a motivated new patient calls your practice when you are closed, do they get help or do they get.

Michael Arias: If you wanna fix that without hiring more humans or stretching your team thinner, go in the shown below and click on the first link in the shown below and it'll take you to the voice assist page. And even if you don't move forward with it today, you'll immediately see what your phone process could look like when it's built to catch every opportunity.

Michael Arias: And if you wanna connect with Ryan directly, he mentioned he's active on LinkedIn, so that's also gonna be in the show notes below. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I appreciate you always supporting the podcast. And I'll catch you in the next episode.