26-site dental group: 95% reduction in call abandonment, £95K saved on UK wage bill

A 26-site dental group running both NHS and private services had a recurring patient experience problem: at peak times — Monday mornings, post-bank-holiday returns, evening overflow — calls to local practice reception lines were going unanswered. Internal data showed that around one in three calls outside core hours was being abandoned before connection. For a group pushing private treatment growth, every abandoned call was potentially a lost private treatment plan.

The conventional fix would have been to staff up local reception teams across all 26 sites — expensive, hard to recruit for at unsocial hours, and inefficient given that overflow demand was concentrated in known peak windows.

The group worked with Ember to set up a centralised offshore reception overflow team trained specifically for UK dental: Denplan and DPAS workflows, treatment terminology, triage of urgent versus routine calls, and warm transfer to clinical leads where needed. The team operated as an extension of the in-house UK reception function, picking up overflow when local lines were busy or out of hours.

Call abandonment across the group fell by 95%. Calls were answered within service level even at peak demand. The cost differential between the offshore overflow team and the equivalent UK reception headcount delivered £95,000 of net annualised saving on the UK wage bill — money the group has redirected into private treatment marketing and clinical equipment investment.

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