How an inbound new-patient call to a dental practice gets scored, 0–5 per stage.
Version 1 · August 2026 · Leonid Rybintsev
How it is scored
One inbound call is one unit. Each of the seven stages is scored 0–5 on what was actually said, not on what was intended. 1, 2 and 4 sit between the anchors below.
Two rules I try to hold to:
Score behaviour, not warmth. Every receptionist in my samples was polite. Politeness is not a stage.
Score what the caller received. If the information exists inside the practice but never reached the caller, it did not happen.
Reported per practice: the average per stage, the share of calls scoring 1 or 0 per stage, and whether the call ended with any way to contact the patient.
The seven stages
1 — Greeting and identification
0
The caller cannot tell who they have reached, or gives up before a human answers. No name given.
3
Practice named, the person gives their own name, tone is warm.
5
As above, and the caller's name is asked for early and used at least once later in the call.
2 — Control of the call
0
Reception answers only what is asked. The caller sets every topic and decides when the call ends.
3
Reception answers, and either volunteers one relevant piece of information or asks one qualifying question. The caller is still driving.
5
Reception states the shape of the call and moves through it: what they need to know, what they will explain, what happens at the end.
3 — Understanding the patient
0
No question about the patient's situation at any point.
3
One or two factual questions: which tooth, is it missing, how long.
5
Clinical situation, the trigger — "what's led you to look into this" — urgency or pain, and how the patient found the practice.
4 — Presenting the practice
0
Nothing said about the practice, the clinician or the process.
3
The process is explained: stages, rough timelines, what happens at the first appointment.
5
Process, plus the specific clinician who would treat this patient and a reason to prefer them, plus proof actually sent — cases, before-and-afters, bios — not merely mentioned.
5 — Price and objections
0
Price refused entirely, or numbers given with no context and no check that they landed, or the caller's objection deflected to the consultation.
3
A clear price or range with what is included. If the caller objects, a payment route is mentioned.
5
Price with inclusions, and likely additional costs disclosed before the caller can discover them later. When the caller says it is expensive, the response addresses what the money buys and offers a payment route without discounting.
6 — Pre-close
0
No check of any kind before the call moves to its end.
3
One check that the information landed: "does that make sense", "how does that sound".
5
An explicit attempt to surface the remaining hesitation: "what else do you need from me to make this decision".
7 — Next step and contact capture
0
The call ends with no name, no contact detail and no agreed next action.
3
Either a contact detail is taken, or a specific next step is agreed.
5
Both. A contact detail is taken and a next action is agreed with a time attached, owned by the practice rather than the patient: "I'll email the surgeon's profile today and call you Friday morning."
What this has been checked against
Partially, and in one direction.
On a larger study I had a practice's own recordings and could follow whether the caller booked and whether they attended. Where every stage scored 4 or above, first-time callers booked and attended. I do not have the exact counts to hand, so treat that as a pattern I watched rather than a statistic I can hand over.
Two findings sit alongside it.
Returning patients attend regardless
If reception handles them badly they come in anyway and complain to the dentist. The rubric only predicts for people who have never been to the practice before.
Attendance is decided after the call, not only on it
The practices that held on to people sent a message immediately after hanging up — a short video introduction to the specific dentist who would be treating them, plus written answers to exactly what that patient had asked about. Then a confirmation call the day before, and an SMS three to five hours ahead.
A good call gets the booking. What happens in the next hour decides whether anyone turns up.
What it does not measure
Anything asynchronous
The unit is a synchronous voice call. Where the patient journey runs over days through messaging — records, images, treatment planning, pricing, follow-up — stages 6 and 7 in particular do not survive contact with it in their current form. A message thread has no single moment where a next step is agreed, and no single point where a contact detail is either taken or lost.
Everything downstream of the booking
Attendance, treatment acceptance in the chair, and whether the case was completed all sit outside this rubric — even though the finding above suggests a large part of the loss lives there.
Whether the score causes the outcome
The correlation is observational, on small samples, scored by one analyst. Validating it properly needs scores matched against a practice's diary over a quarter. That is the next thing I build, and until it exists this is a structured opinion rather than a prediction.
Where it has been run
25 practices, one market, average case value above £1,800, scored from the practices' own recordings. Greeting averaged 3.4. Stages 2–7 averaged 1.7. The write-up.
7 UK practices, mystery-shopped on one afternoon in April 2026 with the same single-implant enquiry. Greeting averaged 3.1. Stages 2–7 averaged 1.9. Five of the seven ended the call with no name, number or email. The seven calls, with extracts.
If you think an anchor is wrong, I want to hear it.
This is version 1. The anchors were written after the scoring, not before it, which is the wrong way round and something I intend to fix in version 2 by scoring a fresh sample blind against the written anchors.
Arguments I'd particularly like: where the anchors break for an asynchronous patient journey, and whether stage 4 is scoring the practice or scoring the receptionist.