What a 4 hour reply costs your clinic

Every clinic knows what it spends on advertising, but almost none can say what happens to the enquiries that spending produces. The gap between those two numbers is usually the largest unmanaged cost in the business.

This piece is arithmetic rather than a study, so use your own figures, and if you do not have them to hand, that is the finding.

1. 1What you spend on advertising in a month.
2. 2How many enquiries that produces, across every channel including missed calls.
3. 3What a patient is worth on the first visit, at your average ticket.
4. 4How many of those enquiries got a reply within 15 minutes.

The first 3 are usually easy, and most clinics can produce them in a few minutes. The fourth is where the room goes quiet, because nobody is counting.

A patient asking about a treatment is not shopping the way they shop for a sofa. They have decided to do something and they are choosing who does it, and that decision has a short window. They message 2 or 3 clinics, and the first useful answer usually wins, not the best one.

By the next morning the enquiry is not colder but gone, because someone else booked them.

This is why an average response time is a misleading number. An average of 40 minutes can hide the fact that half your enquiries are answered in 2 minutes and half are answered the next day. The half answered the next day is the entire problem, and the average is designed to hide it.

Take your monthly enquiries and subtract the ones answered inside 15 minutes, then multiply what is left by your average first visit value. Multiply that by the rate you would normally convert an enquiry into a booking, because not every one of those would have booked anyway.

The number at the bottom is not lost revenue in theory. It is revenue you already paid to generate and then did not collect.

Most owners running this for the first time expect the answer to be small. It is not small, because the enquiries that go unanswered are not randomly distributed. They cluster in the evenings and at weekends, which is exactly when someone sitting at home decides to do something about their teeth.

It does not tell you the cause. A clinic that answers slowly is not a clinic with a lazy front desk, but usually one whose front desk is with a patient, which is what you want them doing.

It also does not tell you which channel is worst. Missed calls and Instagram messages behave differently from a website form, and the fix is different for each. You need the enquiries broken out by channel before the number is useful for anything other than alarm.

That is the whole reason we start every clinic with the free audit rather than a proposal. A week on your own numbers costs you nothing and tells you whether any of this applies to you, and which of it to fix first. If your reply times are already good, you will have found that out for free, and we will say so.