The questions UK dental principals actually ask.

Four price points. Reviews-only is £99/mo for practices that already have a receptionist and just want automated Google review requests. Solo is £349/mo for a single-site practice with voice, diary and reviews included. Practice is £699/mo for higher call volume plus waitlist automation and dormant patient reactivation. Group is £1,399/mo for multi-site groups up to five locations with cross-site routing and a dedicated customer success contact. All prices exclude VAT. No setup fee. 30-day rolling contracts.

No setup fee on any tier. Onboarding, PMS integration, voice configuration and knowledge base build are all included in the monthly price. All plans are 30-day rolling contracts — cancel with 30 days’ notice at any time.

Yes. The Reviews tier at £99/mo gives you automated Google review requests after appointments, the written audit log of every message, and inbound SMS classification. It works alongside your existing reception team. For practices that already have a phone setup that works but want to ask for Google reviews consistently without anyone at the desk having to remember, Reviews-only is the right starting tier.

dentdial does not cut you off. Calls above your limit are billed at £0.95 each, with no per-minute charges. The dashboard flags overage as it happens, and the customer success team recommends a plan change if it’s happening every month.

Yes — a 14-day free trial is available on the Solo and Practice tiers. The trial gives the practice time to validate dentdial against real call volume and treatment mix before committing to a paid subscription.

Every ring is answered within two seconds. No voicemail. No holding queue. No “the practice is now closed.” It works during opening hours as overflow when the reception team is busy, or 24/7 as your primary reception layer for evenings, weekends and overnight calls.

Yes — most practices use it that way. dentdial handles overflow when the team is busy, takes routine bookings, manages out-of-hours calls and runs the SMS automations. The human receptionist focuses on complex cases, patients in person, anxious callers, and escalations. dentdial is designed to free reception teams, not replace them.

Two weeks from signing to go-live, typically. Week one is a discovery call followed by configuration against your practice — treatment names, clinician preferences, emergency protocols, plan-specific policies. Week two is shadow mode: dentdial runs alongside your existing reception without taking live calls so your team can review every draft decision. Adjustments are made before go-live.

Either. Practices typically configure dentdial as overflow during opening hours and as primary cover overnight, on weekends, and on bank holidays. Some practices route 100% of inbound calls through dentdial and the reception team focuses entirely on patients in person. The configuration is per-practice.

Yes. dentdial works with the practice’s existing number through standard call forwarding. No need to switch number, no new line installation, no change visible to patients. Forwarding can be set to all calls, busy/no-answer overflow, or out-of-hours only.

Dentally (deepest), Software of Excellence (SOE), R4, and iSmile. The Dentally integration covers treatment plan reading, practitioner availability, plan status, and writing notes back to the patient record. It’s the most mature integration and the one running in production at our pilot deployment.

Twelve languages with native fluency: English, Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Mandarin, and Bengali. dentdial detects the caller’s language automatically on the opening greeting and switches without missing a beat. English transcripts of every call still arrive in your inbox regardless of the language the call was conducted in.

Yes. dentdial writes appointments directly into the practice’s diary in Dentally, SOE, R4 or iSmile. It books the correct slot length based on treatment type, the correct clinician based on availability and patient preference, and writes call notes back to the patient record.

Yes. For new-patient appointments — consultations, cosmetic assessments, implant reviews — dentdial sends a Stripe payment link to the caller’s mobile mid-call. The booking is only confirmed once the deposit clears. Most useful for the highest-value slots in the diary, where no-shows have the biggest revenue impact.

Yes. dentdial reads each patient’s plan status from Dentally before proposing a slot or quoting a price. NHS exam pricing (£26.80) is applied for NHS patients, private exam pricing (£79) for private. NHS recall intervals are respected separately from private recall preferences. Exemption codes that affect what a patient can be charged are recognised.

After every completed appointment, dentdial sends the patient a personalised SMS asking for a Google review — on a short post-appointment delay so it lands while the visit is fresh, and only inside the contact hours you set. Patients who’ve opted out are never texted, and every request is logged with a timestamp in the audit trail.

dentdial operates against a written emergency triage protocol configured per-practice and signed off by the practice’s CQC Registered Manager. The protocol distinguishes fracture from chip, abscess from gum irritation, pain from sensitivity, trauma from delayable. Urgent cases are routed to the next emergency slot or escalated to the on-call clinician. Every triage decision is logged against the protocol it followed.

Three differences. (1) dentdial is built specifically for UK dental practices — it knows the difference between NHS and private, FP17 implications, exemption codes, clinical terminology, GDC and CQC regulatory context. (2) A written audit log on every outbound message — defensible to regulators. (3) Built by an active UK practice owner, not a Silicon Valley engineering team that added dental as a vertical.

Yes. Every decision — every call answered, every booking made, every outbound message sent or held — is logged with a written reason and timestamp. The audit log is available to the practice in real time and can be exported for CQC inspections, GDC complaints, ICO data subject requests, or internal governance reviews.

Every call is logged with a transcript and reasoning. Emergencies are routed to humans by default. Complaints are escalated to a named team member the same working day. Ambiguous cases generate a drafted reply for staff to review before sending. If a genuine error occurs, the practice can replay the call, view the AI’s reasoning, and feedback into the configuration — corrections take effect immediately.

Application infrastructure runs primarily in the UK. Database storage sits in the EU under the UK-EU adequacy framework. AI processing (voice synthesis and language modelling) is handled by named subprocessors under UK GDPR Standard Contractual Clauses, with international transfer safeguards documented in the DPA. Patient data is never used to train third-party models. A current subprocessor list is maintained and updated publicly.

dentdial holds current Cyber Essentials certification covering infrastructure, access control and security policies, with annual renewal scheduled. NHS DSPT submission is tracked, and ISO 27001 audit work is in progress for international expansion.

Yes. We sign a UK GDPR Data Processing Agreement with every customer practice. The practice is the Data Controller; dentdial is the Data Processor. Sub-processors are listed publicly. Every patient call captures a lawful-basis recording disclosure on opening. Patients can opt out, request transcripts, or request deletion at any time.

Yes — calls are recorded by default for quality, audit and clinical safety. Every call opens with a lawful-basis disclosure. Recordings are encrypted with per-tenant keys and retained for a configurable period (default 90 days). Only the practice and dentdial’s named support engineers can access them, subject to the controls in the DPA. Patients can request a copy of their own recording at any time.

No. Patient data is never used to train third-party AI models. Voice processing happens under processing-only agreements with named subprocessors, with explicit no-training contractual safeguards. The subprocessor list and processing terms are documented in the dentdial DPA.

Out-of-hours emergencies are handled against the practice’s written triage protocol. dentdial assesses urgency from the description, gives appropriate self-care guidance if it’s safe to delay, books the first available emergency slot for the morning if it’s not, and provides the local NHS 111 dental triage number for life-threatening situations. Every interaction is logged. The practice receives an SMS or email summary by 8am.

Complaints are identified by the inbound classifier and escalated to a named team member the same working day with full call context. dentdial does not attempt to resolve complaints itself — it captures the complaint cleanly, acknowledges to the patient that it’s being escalated, and routes to a human under the practice’s GDC-compliant complaints procedure. Every complaint and the action taken is logged.

dentdial detects the caller’s language from the first few seconds and switches to native fluency in that language. The conversation continues in the patient’s language end-to-end — booking, treatment description, pricing, confirmation SMS. The practice still gets an English transcript so reception can follow up if needed.

dentdial reads the patient’s active treatment plan from Dentally before proposing a slot. For multi-stage treatments — implants, orthodontics, full-mouth rehabilitation — it knows which stage they’re on, which clinician is delivering it, and what slot length is appropriate. The patient doesn’t need to know what to ask for; dentdial books the next correct appointment in their journey.

Yes. The Group tier (£1,399/mo) supports multi-site groups up to five locations. It includes cross-site routing (a patient calling site A about a treatment delivered at site B is handled correctly), group-level reporting, consistent clinician matching across sites, and a dedicated customer success contact. Larger groups beyond five sites are handled through a separate commercial conversation.