Virtual Receptionist
Every call answered. The right ones booked
A virtual receptionist answers your clinic's phone around the clock, daytime, evenings, weekends, and the moments your front desk is already on another call. It qualifies the enquiry, books it into your diary, and logs it, so the patient is booked rather than merely logged.
The outcome
The calls you cannot answer become booked appointments
A full-time receptionist covers around 1,700 hours a year once holiday and sickness are taken out. Patients try to reach clinics across far more than that, evenings, weekends, lunchtimes, and while your front desk is mid-call. Those hours are where enquiries quietly go to a competitor. Covering them is the whole job.
What the Virtual Receptionist actually does
- Answers, every time
- Picks up within seconds, day or night, including when your front desk is already on a call. No hold music, no answerphone, no “please call back during opening hours”. Answer rate is one of the numbers we baseline for two weeks beforehand, so you see the change rather than take it on trust.
- Qualifies the enquiry
- Asks what the patient is calling about, which treatment, and whether they are new or returning, in your clinic's own language, not a generic script. Out-of-scope callers are handled politely rather than booked in error.
- Books into your diary
- Checks real availability and books the appointment, rather than taking a message for someone to action tomorrow. What it can book into depends on the practice management system you run, which we check before anyone quotes you anything. That is the line between an answering service and a front desk.
- Logs everything
- Every call recorded as a structured enquiry with source attribution, so you can finally see how many calls you get, when they come, and what happens to them.
- Escalates when it should
- Clinical questions, complaints and anything unusual go to a human, with the context already gathered. It is built to know its limits.
What it’s worth
Compare it to the cost of covering the hours, not to a salary
The right comparison is not a receptionist's wage, it is what an hour of covered phone time costs you, and how many hours currently are not covered at all. Run that arithmetic on your own numbers and the answer is usually obvious in either direction, which is why we publish it rather than assert it.
For context: at the ONS median clinic receptionist salary of £24,678, the fully loaded cost (employer NI, pension, holiday and sickness cover) works out at roughly £14.78 to £16.51 per hour actually covered, against a headline rate of £12.66. Most owners have never run that calculation. Figures verified August 2026.
How it’s built
Yours, on your own infrastructure
The system runs on infrastructure registered to your clinic, your numbers, your database, your call records. It is a build, not a subscription with our margin on top, and there is no per-minute meter that punishes you for growing. If we stop working together, it keeps running and you keep the data.
- Registered to your businessThe numbers, the database, the automations, the website and every call record sit in accounts in your organisation's name.
- We hold access, not ownershipOur route in is a permission you grant, and one you can withdraw without anything stopping.
- If we stop working togetherThe system keeps running and nothing has to be exported, because none of it was ever somewhere else.
What it takes
Live in days, judged on your own baseline
We measure two weeks of your current answer rate, response time and booking rate before anything changes, then install and tune against it. Nothing goes live until we can show you what it replaced. No new software for your team to learn, it sits behind what you already use.
What owners ask first
Will patients know they are not speaking to a person?
It introduces itself as your clinic's booking line and does not pretend to be a named member of staff. In practice most callers are trying to get an appointment at a time that suits them, and care far more about being booked than about who booked them. Anyone who asks for a human gets one.
Does this replace our receptionist?
No, and we would advise against trying. It covers the hours a receptionist cannot, evenings, weekends, holidays, lunch, and when they are already on another call. Your front desk keeps doing the part that needs a person: greeting patients who are in front of them, and handling the conversations that need judgement.
How much does an AI receptionist cost in the UK?
From published pricing across UK providers reviewed in August 2026, AI receptionist services typically run £149 to £299 a month, with budget options from around £10 and hybrid human-backed services from £500. Answering services often quote a low monthly fee plus £0.15 to £0.40 per minute, which inverts the comparison as call volume grows. Ours is priced per clinic because scope varies with your practice management system and call volume.
Does it work with our practice management system?
It integrates with the leading practice management systems to create one process rather than two. Booking into your live diary is the point of the system; if we cannot integrate cleanly with yours, we will tell you before you commit rather than after.
What happens if it gets something wrong?
Anything it is not confident about is escalated to a person with the context already gathered, rather than guessed at. Every call is logged, so mistakes are visible and correctable instead of disappearing. We tune it against your real calls in the first fortnight.
Can it handle out-of-hours emergencies?
It routes urgent calls according to rules you set: to your on-call number, to a specific person, or with a clear instruction to the caller. It never attempts to judge a clinical question, which is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature.
Free · No install · Results in 48 hours
Find out what's recoverable in your clinic
We mystery-shop your clinic the way a patient would, by search, phone and web form, then show you the patients you could be winning. Scored on three things: are you found, is the enquiry answered, does anyone chase it.