For dental practices
Dental answering service for UK practices
Your practice phone, answered every time. Maeby picks up when reception is busy or gone home, quotes from your fee guide, offers real appointment slots, and logs the call without giving clinical advice.
UK & EU data residency · No call recordings
- Answered on the first ring, including evenings and weekends
- Every callAnswered on the first ring, including evenings and weekends
- Clinical advice given; anything clinical goes to a human
- ZeroClinical advice given; anything clinical goes to a human
- Patient call data processed and stored in Ireland
- EU onlyPatient call data processed and stored in Ireland
Where the phone costs you money
Reception has two hands and one phone
The busiest moments on the desk are also when the highest-value calls come in. Someone is checking a patient in, taking a card payment, and answering a query about a crown, and the phone rings twice.
- New-patient registration enquiries go to voicemail during the morning rush
- Existing patients ring back later, or don't
- The desk gets interrupted mid-conversation with the person in front of them
Cancellations leave gaps nobody fills
A chair that empties at 9am is revenue gone by lunchtime unless somebody works the list. In practice that job competes with everything else on the desk, and usually loses.
- Same-day cancellations need a fast outbound response you can't always staff
- The patients most likely to take the slot are the ones already asking about availability
- Gaps compound when reception is short-staffed
Out-of-hours calls arrive with no triage
Evening and weekend calls land as a voicemail list with no urgency attached. Monday morning starts with sorting them instead of acting on them.
- Urgent and routine calls look identical in a voicemail inbox
- Most callers don't leave a message at all
- Nobody knows what was missed, only what was recorded
What your agent handles
Tools are switched on per agent and configured with your details — no bespoke development.
Quotes from your own fee guide
Upload your price list once. The agent quotes your figures for a check-up, hygienist visit, or whitening, not a generic range it invented.
Books into real availability
Reads your diary, offers slots the practice can actually honour, and confirms before the caller hangs up.
New-patient registration
Answers NHS versus private questions, what to bring to a first appointment, and how registration works, consistently, every time.
Escalates anything clinical
The agent will not give clinical advice. Those calls transfer to a human or become a message with a callback number and a summary.
Out-of-hours triage
Captures urgency after close so the morning list arrives already prioritised rather than as raw voicemail.
Logged against the patient record
Caller matched by phone number, with the call summary and outcome written back as activity.
Why dental practices lose calls
Most businesses miss calls at the edges of the day. Dental practices miss them in the middle: during the handover between appointments, when the desk is dealing with a payment, a check-in, and a query about a treatment plan at the same time.
That timing matters, because the calls arriving in those windows skew toward the ones you most want to answer. Someone ringing at 10:40 on a Tuesday to ask what an implant costs is a live private-treatment enquiry. Someone ringing at 8pm has usually just been told by a friend to register somewhere new.
What can be answered without a clinician
The useful line to draw isn’t “simple versus complex” but “information the practice has already written down” versus “judgement about a patient”.
The first category is larger than most practices assume:
- Prices for named treatments, from your fee guide
- Availability, and booking into it
- Confirming, moving, or cancelling an existing appointment
- Registration process, NHS versus private, what to bring
- Opening hours, parking, accessibility, which surgery to come to
None of it requires a clinician; all of it currently lands on reception.
The second category (“is this pain something I should worry about,” “should I keep the crown that came off”) is not on the list, and is not something we will let an agent answer. It transfers or becomes a message.
Where practices tend to start
The lowest-risk entry point is out-of-hours. Nobody is currently answering those calls, so the comparison isn’t “agent versus receptionist” but “agent versus voicemail”, which is a much easier bar and a much easier conversation with your team.
Once evenings and weekends are covered and you’ve read a week of transcripts, the daytime overflow case makes itself. The agent picks up when the desk doesn’t within a set number of rings, so reception keeps the calls it can take and stops losing the ones it can’t.
What to check before you commit
Ask any supplier in this space three questions, and be unsatisfied with vague answers:
- Where is the call data processed and stored? Not just stored: processed. Both need to be in-region for this to be straightforward under UK GDPR.
- Is the audio retained at all? If it is, you’ve taken on a store of patient voices with a retention policy someone has to own, and a conversation with your DPO you could have avoided.
- How long do transcripts live, and can you delete one patient’s? “Indefinitely” and “not without deleting everything” are both real answers you will get, and both are problems you inherit.
Compliance
Built for GDPR,not retrofitted to them.
The constraints that make voice AI awkward in regulated markets were designed in from the start.
- Processed and stored in Europe
- Calls, transcripts, and summaries stay in Europe. AI models are also based there and have zero data retention policies.
- Audio is never stored
- Speech is transcribed as the call happens and discarded.
- Everything a caller said expires
- Transcripts, caller numbers, and messages are deleted automatically 90 days after the call. Not a setting you have to remember.
- Erase customer data
- If a caller asks to be forgotten, you can erase every trace of them from the dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
Will patients realise it's not a person?
If you want them to, and we'd recommend it. You write the greeting and it's spoken word for word, so you control exactly how the practice introduces itself. The greeting we start you with says the caller is speaking to an AI assistant.
Can it give clinical advice?
No. The agent is constrained to practice information: prices, availability, opening hours, what to bring, how to register. Anything clinical is escalated to a human or captured as a message with a callback number. This is a platform guardrail, not a prompt instruction you could accidentally override.
Does it work with our practice management system?
Calls are written back as contact activity with the caller matched by phone number. Tell us which system you use when you sign up; integrations are prioritised by what practices ask for.
Is this compatible with our patient confidentiality obligations?
Call data is processed and stored in the EU (Ireland), call audio is never recorded, and transcripts, caller numbers and messages are deleted automatically 90 days after the call. You remain the data controller and we act as processor. Speak to your DPO before rolling it out, as you would with any new system handling patient data.
What happens with a dental emergency?
You define what counts as urgent and where those calls go. The agent can transfer immediately to a nominated number, or capture the details and flag the call for priority callback. It does not assess or triage clinically.
How long does setup take?
Most practices are testing an agent in the browser the same afternoon. Going live on a real number takes longer only if you need a new UK geographic number, which requires a verified business address first.
Hear it answeryour phone.
Set up an agent, try it in your browser, and put it on a real number.