Abandoned Is Not Missed

"I hung up. I didn't want to leave a message."

A patient says that at the counter, about a call she made when nobody could pick up. She called, it rang, the greeting started, and she put the phone down. Now ask your phone system what that call was. Depending on which system you have, it was a missed call, an abandoned call, both at once, or a call with its own category that is neither.

This blog ran the same exercise on practice management software in September, asking four systems what they count as unscheduled treatment and getting four answers. The phone deserves the same, because "missed calls" is the number every phone vendor in dentistry quotes at you, and almost none of them says what it counts.

Five systems, two callers

These are hosted phone and call-center systems with public help pages. The point is the spread, not the brand. To make the spread visible, add a second caller: the one who hung up while the phone was still ringing, before the greeting ever started.

Dialpad draws the line at the ring. A help page it published in February 2025, announcing a change to its own definitions, says an abandoned call is "A call that is disconnected by the caller before the ring-out" and a missed call is "A call that rang out without being answered." Our first patient waited for the greeting, so she is missed. The second hung up while it was ringing, so she is abandoned. Two rings apart, two columns.

JustCall does not use the word abandoned on its call-logs page at all. Its status column holds outcomes like "Completed, No Answer, Busy, Failed," and a separate column, Missed Call Type, gives "The reason a call was missed (e.g., not picked by agent, outside working hours)." Both callers most likely sit in one missed count there, with a reason attached, as does a call that comes in after closing.

MightyCall sets a clock. "Inbound calls are considered dropped by the caller within 4 seconds," and dropped calls are listed apart from connected and not connected. Its dispositions include "Contact no response," meaning "The call wasn't answered in the specified ringing period," and "Contact abandoned," meaning "The contact ended the call that wasn't a part of a queue." Our first patient is no response. The second is contact abandoned, unless she hung up inside four seconds, in which case she is dropped, and dropped is not missed.

Talkdesk draws the line at the agent. A missed call "Rang at least one agent and was either not answered or was rejected," and the list includes a call "routed to voicemail directly (for example, outside of business hours)" where "the caller hung up during the voicemail greeting." An abandoned call "Did not reach the agents because the caller hung up while in the waiting queue or in the IVR." The rule of thumb on the page: "once a customer has connected with at least one agent, the call can no longer be considered Abandoned." Both of our callers are missed here, because the phone rang at a person. The caller Dialpad calls abandoned, Talkdesk calls missed.

Xima goes the other way. "An abandoned call is defined as any inbound call that does not end in a 'Talking', 'Callback Scheduled' or 'Voicemail' event," and "It is possible for an abandoned call to also be an answered call." A missed call is one where an agent "was involved in one or more 'Ringing', or 'Queue' event, but not a 'Talking' event." The page says it plainly: "all missed calls are considered abandoned, but not all abandoned calls are considered missed calls." Both of our callers are missed and abandoned at the same time. A call Talkdesk says cannot be abandoned once an agent answers, Xima says can.

What the word means, then

Read those five again and the pattern is that there is no pattern. "Missed" means the phone rang at a person and nobody picked up, or it means any call that never became a conversation, or it means a count with a reason column beside it. "Abandoned" means the caller gave up before the ring-out, or before an agent, or before a conversation, or it is not a word the system uses. One system does not count the call as missed at all if it ends inside four seconds.

None of these is wrong. Each is exact about its own product. What is wrong is the sentence "practices miss a large share of their calls," said as though "miss" were one thing. Every figure like that is one vendor's customers, counted under that vendor's definition. This post uses no such figure for exactly that reason.

Read yours

So the first job is not a bigger number. It is the sentence. Open your own system's help page, or ask your vendor to send it, and find the line that says what the missed-call column counts. Does a call that reaches voicemail count as missed, as answered, or as its own thing? Does a hang-up during the greeting count at all, and after how many seconds? Is after-hours a reason, a category, or invisible? Is there a word for the caller who gave up in the queue, and is it the same word you have been using in the morning huddle?

Earlier this month this blog walked through reading your own call log and sorting the unanswered calls into piles by hand. That exercise only works if you know what the system decided before you looked. The pile called "missed" in your report and the pile called "missed" in your head are two piles until you have read the sentence. Wednesday's post covered the call going the other direction, the voicemail your team leaves; whatever your system calls the inbound rows, the returned call is yours.

Where the row changes

Laine, the patient-facing voice in AiroDental, answers the call that would otherwise ring out during a busy morning or come in after closing. It answers in the caller's language, more than 90 of them, and books or moves the appointment in Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Open Dental or CareStack. In every one of the five vocabularies above, that call stops being whatever the system would have named it, because it ended in a conversation. The patient at the counter does not say "I hung up," because someone answered.

What Laine does not do is settle the definition. Your system still keeps its own word for the calls that did not go to Laine, and you still have to read it. Saige, the team-facing assistant, is where the sentence you find belongs, next to the practice's other standing instructions, so the next person who pulls the report knows what "missed" meant when the count was taken.

If you have never read your phone system's definition of a missed call, read it before you quote the number again. If the calls behind the number are ringing out, there is no long-term contract and no onboarding fee. Hear the call end in a conversation.

Deren Flesher, DDS. Founder, AiroDental.