A patient who wants an implant does not call one clinic. They call four, in the same hour, from the same sofa, and the shortlist gets made out of whichever calls went well. That is the part most clinics never see: the comparison is happening on the phone, and the phone is usually the least managed thing they own. So we called two of our own clients as patients and scored what happened.
How we measured
Two anonymised private clinics in Moscow, both of them accounts of ours: one dental practice, one fertility centre. We put the same request to the clinic's own front desk and to the neuro-agent running on the same account, and scored both against eight criteria at zero to two. These are our own recordings and our own scores, not a study. We are not publishing the recordings and we are not naming the clinics. Nothing below is a price: what crosses over from a Moscow price list to your market is the shape of the answer, not the number.
Call one: what does a turnkey implant cost
The question was the one every implant patient asks first and the one almost every clinic answers worst: what does the whole thing cost, start to finish, with nothing left to add later.
Getting to a human took 53 seconds. Then the administrator put the call on hold for another 34 seconds to fetch somebody who could talk about prices. One minute and 41 seconds before the question could even be asked. The neuro-agent on the same account picked up in 2 seconds.
Then the interesting part. Asked what a turnkey implant costs, the front desk named a figure that came to about half the clinic's own turnkey total. Asked again, in the same call, it gave the same half.
Asked twice for the whole price, the front desk quoted about half of it twice.
That is worse than quoting high. A patient who hears half the number puts the clinic at the top of the shortlist, arrives, finds out the abutment and the crown are separate lines, and leaves feeling handled. The clinic wins the call and loses the patient, which is the most expensive way there is to lose one.
The agent answered differently on the same price list, on the same day. It named the four things a turnkey implant is actually made of, said plainly that the final figure depends on an examination, and offered to book the examination.
What the caller is really doing
They are not asking for a number. They are asking for a number they can compare. An incomplete answer is not a cheaper answer, it is an unusable one, and the caller finds that out at the next clinic on the list rather than at yours.
Call two: can you even reach a coordinator
The fertility centre had the opposite problem. The people were better and the line was worse.
Across the calls, the average wait before a human voice said anything was about 100 seconds. Hold music ran from 1:19 to 2:23 depending on the call. One of the calls ended without the coordinator ever being reached at all.
When a call did land, it took 10 minutes and 2 transfers, and the caller explained the same situation three times to three different people. The agent on the same account took 4 minutes, in one unbroken conversation, and asked nothing twice.
Instead of an answer on programme eligibility, the live line offered a callback inside 15 minutes. The callback was not the problem. The problem showed up the next day: nothing from the first call had been written down, so the second call started from nothing. On that follow-up the live line scored 1/6.
The cheapest thing a clinic can do on the phone is remember the last call. Almost nobody does it.
The scorecard
Both calls were scored the same way, on eight things a caller notices whether or not they could name them:
- How fast anything at all happened.
- Whether the person on the line established who they were talking to.
- Whether anyone asked what the caller actually needed.
- Whether the answer given was complete.
- Whether the price was stated in a form the caller could compare.
- Whether the obvious objection was handled or deflected.
- Whether the call ended with a next step.
- Whether the caller's contact details were captured.
Each one scored zero, one or two. The dental front desk finished on 4/16 against the agent's 15/16. The fertility front desk, which was genuinely good at the medicine, finished on 9/16 against 16/16.
The uncomfortable part
Neither front desk was rude, lazy or badly trained. The fertility coordinator handled every clinical question and every objection correctly and still lost most of the available points, because most of the points are operational rather than clinical.
What both calls have in common
Three failures, and not one of them is about attitude:
- Speed. Not the length of the call, the time before the caller hears a human being. ContactBabel put the average across UK contact centres at 116 seconds in 2024, and a Velaro survey back in 2012 found around 60% of callers will not hold longer than a minute. Both of these clinics sit inside that trap.
- Completeness. The front desk knows the price list exists. It does not have the price list in front of it, so it quotes the part it remembers, which is the first line and the smallest one.
- Memory. Nothing said during a call survives the call. Every later conversation restarts, and the caller reads that as being a stranger to a business they have already spoken to twice.
None of the three gets fixed by a training session, because none of the three is a knowledge problem. They are all what happens to a person under load with no reliable place to put things.
What the AI voice agent actually changed
On both accounts the neuro-agent answered in 2 seconds, quoted the structure of the price rather than its first line, captured the caller's details, and put what it had learned into the record before the call ended.
It is worth being precise about why, because it is not intelligence. The agent has the price list open on every single call, and it cannot decide that this particular caller probably only wants the headline figure. It does not get tired at the end of a shift. It does not forget to write the note, because writing the note is not a separate task it has to remember to do.
The agent did not out-think anyone on that line. It simply never forgot the price list.
What it did not do
It did not diagnose anything and it did not try. On the dental call it scored 15 out of 16 rather than 16, and the missing point is the honest one: it could not give a final price either, because a final price needs an examination. What it could do was say exactly that, in one sentence, instead of quoting half a number twice.
It also did not replace the coordinator. On the fertility account the clinical conversation still belongs to the coordinator, and it is better than anything an agent will do this year. What changed is that the coordinator now picks up a call with the intake already taken. That is the arrangement we argue for everywhere: the agent takes the part that is arithmetic and the human takes the part that is judgement.
What to do with your own line
You can run this test on yourself this week, and you probably should, because the result is usually worse than anyone in the building expects.
- Call your own main number from a phone nobody there recognises, at a normal busy hour, and time the wait before a human voice says anything.
- Ask for the total price of your most expensive service, then ask again in the same call. Compare both answers against your own price list.
- Call back the next day, mention the first call, and see whether anybody knows what you are talking about.
- Score all of it out of sixteen on the eight criteria above, so the result is a number your team can argue with instead of an opinion they can dismiss.
- Fix in this order: answer time, then completeness, then memory. Answer time is the only one your callers are actively timing.
Everything in this piece came out of doing exactly that on two clinics that were confident their phones were fine.