What You’ll Learn
- The Hidden Cost of Manual Scheduling: Why practices lose hundreds of appointments monthly (worth $40,000-90,000) by not offering online dental scheduling
- The 25% Daily Vanishing Act: How to turn inevitable cancellations into 100% hygiene utilization through strategic overbooking
- The 3% Myth: Why the feared “double-booking disaster” almost never happens and simple solutions when it does
- The After-Hours Goldmine: How to capture appointments from parents at 10 PM and professionals during commutes that phone-only practices never see
- The 30-40% Time Drain: What your front desk could accomplish if they weren’t playing phone tag all day
- Breaking Staff Resistance: Data-driven strategies to overcome the “we like to control the schedule” pushback
- The Frictionless Mindset: Why scheduling should be as easy as ordering DoorDash and how to get there
- Smart Overbooking Algorithms: How modern systems analyze patterns to fill schedules without creating chaos
- The 70% Demand Factor: Why millennials won’t call for appointments and what this means for your practice’s future
Why Your Dental Practice Is Bleeding Appointments Without Online Dental Scheduling
Colin Ambler drops a bombshell midway through his conversation with Adrian Lefler: his dental practice sees hundreds of appointments come through online booking every month. “I just have to assume that if online booking is not in place, those couple hundred appointments are going somewhere else.”
Read that again. That’s hundreds of appointments every month, all going to practices that make scheduling as easy as ordering DoorDash while others cling to phone-tag appointment requests. As founder of TeamCare Dental and former manager of a 14-operatory practice, Ambler has watched this divide grow between practices embracing frictionless scheduling and those hemorrhaging patients to more accessible competitors.
The 70% Reality Check That Should Terrify Every Practice Owner
Accenture’s research reveals that 70% of millennials demand online booking for everything. Not prefer. Not appreciate. Demand. Yet when Ambler visits dental practices—thousands of them at this point—he’s consistently “dumbfounded” by how many lack any online dental scheduling option whatsoever.
The excuses are predictable: “We like to control the schedule.” “It’s on our list.” “The staff doesn’t like it.” Meanwhile, these same practices wonder why their marketing dollars aren’t converting to filled chairs.
Lefler, who runs My Social Practice, puts it bluntly: “We’re hired to put butts in seats. That’s it, flat out.” All the dental SEO, social media, and digital advertising in the world means nothing if patients hit a scheduling roadblock. The gap between marketing success and actual appointments often comes down to one simple factor: friction.
The Go Fish Problem That’s Killing Your Conversion Rate
Remember playing Go Fish as a kid? That back-and-forth guessing game? That’s exactly what phone scheduling feels like to modern patients. “Do you have Tuesday morning?” “No, but we have Thursday evening.” “I work Thursday nights.” “How about Friday afternoon?”
Ambler describes the contrast: “There’s a different experience when you can just look at the available appointments and pick the one that works for you and get a big green check mark telling you that it’s done.”
The traditional appointment request form (where patients submit information and wait for a callback) creates what Lefler calls “anxious limbo.” The practice calls, the patient’s in a meeting. The patient calls back, gets voicemail. By the time they connect, the patient has already booked elsewhere or lost interest entirely.
“That amount of effort in order to schedule an appointment with a dental practice is too much nowadays,” Lefler observes. “It’s just too much.”
The 25% Cancellation Secret
Here’s where Ambler reveals his practice management genius. By photographing schedules at the start and end of each day, he discovered a consistent pattern: 25% of appointments evaporate daily. Every day! We’re not just talking flu season.
Most practices treat this as an unfortunate reality, grimly shouldering the losses. Ambler sees it as an opportunity. “If I told you guaranteed every single day that 25% of these patients would cancel and we could basically isolate which ones would cancel, would you do anything?”
The answer revolutionizes dental scheduling strategy. Instead of letting staff sit idle during inevitable cancellations, smart practices overbook strategically. Airlines do it. Hotels do it. Restaurants do it. Why shouldn’t dental practices?
The Overbooking Algorithm Nobody Talks About
The pushback is immediate and predictable: “What if both patients show up?” Ambler’s response reveals deep operational wisdom. In reality, this “disaster scenario” happens maybe 3% of the time. And when it does?
“Maybe someone arrived 10 minutes early, maybe someone arrived 15 minutes late, maybe the mom and kid were at the same time and we shoved them in the same room, maybe the doctor has a cancellation and the assistant can start x-rays.”
The statistical probability of an actual scheduling crisis—where two patients arrive simultaneously with no possible solution—is so low it’s almost negligible. Yet fear of this rare occurrence keeps practices operating at 75% capacity while fully staffed.
Ambler’s utilization metric is brilliantly simple. If a hygienist works eight hours, they should see eight patients. Without strategic overbooking, this never happens. With it, practices achieve nearly 100% utilization, transforming profitability overnight.
The 30-40% Time Vampire Lurking at Your Front Desk
PatientPop’s research reveals another stunning inefficiency: front desk staff spend 30-40% of their time just handling scheduling. Think about that. Nearly half their day consumed by phone tag, voicemail tennis, and appointment negotiations.
“What are they not able to do because all the phones are jammed up?” Ambler asks. “Maybe they’re missing out on new patient phone calls. Maybe they could be presenting a treatment plan.”
Online dental scheduling doesn’t just convenience patients, but liberates staff for higher-value activities. The human interactions that actually build practice value. The experiences technology can’t replicate. Instead, practices trap their teams in scheduling purgatory while patients seek frictionless alternatives.
The After-Hours Gold Mine You’re Missing
Ambler’s practice stays open until 8 PM and answers most calls. Yet online booking confirmations pour in after hours. Why? Because that’s when exhausted parents finally tackle their to-do lists after tucking kids into bed.
“How many people out there have kids and they work all day… and then they start doing virtual errands on the internet?” These patients could squeeze in three minutes during lunch to book online. Instead, practices force them to play phone tag during business hours they don’t have.
The 24/7 availability of online dental scheduling captures appointments that phone-only practices never even know they missed. Every parent scrolling their phone at 10 PM, every professional booking during their commute, every college student handling life admin at midnight—all lost to practices requiring phone calls.
From Request to Confirmation in Seconds
The most sophisticated online scheduling systems now integrate directly with practice management software, eliminating even backend friction. TeamCare Dental’s approach includes “secret sauce” algorithms that analyze confirmation status, patient history, cancellation patterns by time of day, and other factors to intelligently overbook while minimizing conflicts.
Some systems even prioritize less desirable appointment slots like that 7 PM appointment staff hesitate to offer by highlighting them as “most popular” with green backgrounds and badges. Psychology meets technology to optimize scheduling in ways human schedulers never could.
Your Move: The Frictionless Future Is Now
Ambler’s prediction for the near future sounds like science fiction but is already emerging: “The tools that we have are just going to say, ‘How many appointments do you need?’ We’re going to make sure your schedule’s full.”
But practices don’t need to wait for AI scheduling overlords to transform their operations. The message from both Ambler and Lefler is clear: if you’re not offering online scheduling today, you’re actively choosing to lose patients to practices that do.
The question isn’t whether to implement online dental scheduling but whether you’ll do it before losing another few hundred appointments to more accessible competitors. In Ambler’s words: “Don’t let your staff push you around. Do it. It’s easy.”
In This Episode:
Colin Ambler, MBA, CEO & Co-Founder of TeamCare
Colin Ambler is the CEO and Co-Founder of TeamCare, a dental software company transforming how practices engage and motivate their teams. Before launching TeamCare, he built a $7M+ dental practice with his wife, Dr. Sharon Bleiler, and consulted in hundreds of offices.
Adrian Lefler, CEO and Co-founder of My Social Practice
Adrian Lefler, CEO of My Social Practice, is a seasoned expert in the dental marketing industry with 14 years of experience. He is widely recognized for his engaging and informative presentations. Based in Suncrest, Utah, Adrian shares his life with his wife, four children, and a lively mix of pets. My Social Practice is a leading dental marketing company, and Adrian is passionate about helping dental professionals succeed in this dynamic field.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much revenue are dental practices actually losing without online dental scheduling?
Colin Ambler’s practice receives hundreds of appointments monthly through online booking alone. With average appointment values of $200-300, practices without online scheduling could be losing $40,000-90,000 monthly in potential revenue. Factor in the 70% of millennials who demand online booking and won’t call for appointments, plus after-hours booking opportunities, and annual losses could easily exceed $500,000 for mid-sized practices.
What's the smartest way to handle overbooking without creating chaos?
Start by calculating your actual cancellation rate. Ambler found theirs was consistently 25%. Then strategically overbook by that percentage, focusing on times with highest no-show rates and unconfirmed appointments. The key insight: actual scheduling conflicts (both patients showing up simultaneously with no solution) occur only about 3% of the time. When they do, solutions like early arrivals, late arrivals, or utilizing available assistants resolve most conflicts without drama.
How can practice owners overcome staff resistance to online dental scheduling implementation?
Document the reality with data, as Ambler did by photographing schedules daily to prove the 25% cancellation rate. Show staff that 30-40% of their time currently goes to phone scheduling that could be automated. Most importantly, frame it as a business decision about patient experience, not staff preference. As Lefler notes, employees aren’t concerned about practice profitability—they need to understand this isn’t optional but essential for practice survival and their job security.
