Retell Voice Agent Qualifying Callers for a Dental Clinic

Challenge

Reception was answering the phone with a patient in the chair, so new patient calls got rushed or missed.

Solution

A Retell voice agent that answers every call, works out what the caller actually needs, and books the ones who are ready. Everyone else gets a warm transfer with the transcript attached, so reception picks up a conversation already in progress.

• Retell's own lead qualification template qualifies on budget, project scope and timeline. None of those are the right questions for a dental clinic, so I threw them out.
• The agent asks what the caller needs, whether they've been in before, and how soon they want to be seen. It reads the clinic's answers out of the Knowledge Base instead of improvising, so the price it quotes is the price on the price list.
• Callers who are ready go into the calendar on the call.
• Everyone else gets a warm transfer. The transcript goes with them, so reception isn't starting the conversation again from the top.

Result

The phone is triaged before reception ever picks it up.

• I wouldn't let it do triage. It doesn't tell anyone whether their pain is urgent and it doesn't give clinical advice. Anything that sounds like symptoms goes to a human, and that's written into the prompt rather than left to the model's judgement.
• It collects what a booking needs and nothing else. Name, contact, reason for the visit, whether they've been before.
• Post Call Analysis tags every call with what it was about and how it ended, so the clinic can see what people actually ring about rather than guessing.
• Reception still gets calls. They're just fewer, and they're the ones worth interrupting a filling for.