Reading Your Own Call Log

"I called earlier and nobody picked up."

Every front desk hears it, usually from someone standing at the counter, and the answer is always the same: I'm so sorry, we must have been on the other line. It is a kind answer and it is a guess. Nobody at the desk knows whether that call rang out, went to voicemail, or reached the lunch recording, because nobody looks.

The phone system knows. It wrote a row for that call the moment it came in, and the row is still there. An earlier post on this blog used the call log to build one measurement. This one is about the log itself: what each column says, and where the words in it do not mean what you would assume.

Where it is

If your phones run on an internet-based service, the log sits behind the same login you use to change the greeting or pay the bill. It is called call history, call log or call reports, and it nearly always has an export button that hands you a spreadsheet. If your system is older, the record still exists; the vendor can pull it, and you will be reading it on paper against the schedule. Either way, ask for one ordinary day, every row, not a summary.

Before writing this I read the public help pages of three hosted phone systems to see how each describes its own log. I am not naming them, because which one you have is not the point. The columns are close to identical. The definitions are not.

The columns, left to right

Start time. When the call reached your system, not when somebody answered. Sort by it and you see the shape of your day: where the calls bunch up, and whether that is when the scheduling coordinator is checking patients in, or at lunch, or after the doors are locked.

Direction. Inbound, outbound, or internal. Filter to inbound first. The outbound rows are your team returning calls and confirming appointments, and mixed in they hide everything else.

The caller's number. With a name beside it, if your system recognizes the caller. Look for the same number showing up again a few rows down. That is one person trying twice, and it is the patient at the top of this post.

Ring time. One of the three help pages describes it as "the time it took for the call to be answered," and keeps a second column for the total time a call rang "before being answered or missed." A long ring on an answered call is a coordinator finishing something else before she could reach the phone. That is not a complaint about her. It is a picture of what the desk was carrying at that moment.

Result. Answered, missed, voicemail, and a few others. This is the column everyone wants and the one that travels worst. It gets its own section below.

Duration. One system defines it as "conversation + hold time." Another keeps two figures: the time the call was connected, and a separate duration that runs "from when the call was created to the time it ended," ringing included. So before you read anything into a short call, find out which of those your column is.

Recording or voicemail. A link, if your system keeps them. The row tells you a call happened. Only the link tells you what was said.

The word "missed" belongs to your vendor

Here is how the three systems I read treat a call nobody answered.

The first splits it in two. A missed call is "an inbound call where users were rung but didn't accept." A call that never rang a person at all sits in a different category, which that system calls abandoned. Depending on how your routing is set, your closed-office calls may be in there and not in the missed count at all.

The second keeps one missed count and adds a column for the reason, with examples that include "not picked by agent" and "outside working hours." Its missed total has the closed-office calls inside it.

The third does not use the word. A call is connected or it is not, and a separate result, dropped, covers inbound calls "dropped by the caller within 4 seconds," which is mostly wrong numbers and pocket dials.

So "we missed this many calls last month" is not yet a fact about your practice. It is a fact about a definition. This blog made the same point about the unscheduled treatment report, where each practice management system counts something different under one name. The phone is no different.

The fix is short. Find your own system's definition on its help page and write it across the top of the export. Then sort the unanswered rows into three piles yourself: calls that rang while you were open and nobody answered, calls that came in while you were closed, and calls that ended almost as soon as they started. The first pile is about staffing the desk. The second is about what your recording says and who returns the message. The third is nobody's fault.

What a row cannot tell you

A row has no idea who the caller was. Whether that number belonged to a new patient is in your practice management system, not your phones, and matching the two is handwork.

It cannot tell you a voicemail was returned, either, but it gets close. Find the missed inbound row, then look further down the day for an outbound row to the same number. If it is there, somebody called back. If it is not, nobody did.

And it cannot tell you how the call went. A row for a call that went badly looks exactly like a row for a call that went well.

The one column Laine changes

Laine is the patient-facing side of AiroDental, and in the terms of this post it works on a single column. A call that would have ended as a ring-out, or as a recording after close, ends as a conversation in the caller's language, and Laine speaks more than 90 of them. The appointment goes straight into Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Open Dental or CareStack. Where a phone system's row stops at a time and a duration, the practice also gets a written summary of what the caller needed.

The rest of the page stays with your team. The outbound rows are still your coordinators returning calls and working their lists, and reading the log is still the owner's or the office manager's job. Laine only makes the first pile shorter.

Pull your one day first. Then hear how Laine answers. There is no long-term contract and no onboarding fee.

And the next time a patient at the counter says she called and nobody picked up, the answer can be: let me look.

Deren Flesher, DDS. Founder, AiroDental.