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Inaugural AI Phone Agent Benchmarking
At Liine, we sit at the epicenter of healthcare marketing. Every day, our proprietary AI is listening to and analyzing thousands of real patient phone calls to healthcare practices — calls that are mission critical for growth.
Liine also captures and analyzes web forms and online bookings, but phone calls are operative for this article.
As we all know, answering the phone is a major challenge for many practices. In fact, our data shows that, on average, practices miss 11% of calls during business hours. Not only is this a terrible patient experience for everyone, but because most prospective patients don’t leave a voicemail, it’s a material hindrance to growth.
Marketing leaders can be driving great leads, but if that demand isn’t converted, it’s all for naught.
So it’s no wonder then why AI phone agents have stormed onto the scene, promising to fill this gap and automate scheduling.
At Liine, we’ve had a front-row seat to this transformation — and thanks to our sophisticated call tracking AI, we’ve been able to analyze the initial performance of these AI agents.
Preliminary Results Thus Far
Based on our call analytics, we know that, on average, human schedulers convert 52% of new patient inquiries (the most valuable and complex type) into appointments.
In comparison, the chart below shows the new patient call-to-appointment conversion rate for five AI agents currently being leveraged across our customer base.
Footnote: Given that this technology is rapidly evolving and our sample size is still relatively small, we have elected to only name the top-performing vendor (for now).
At 50.9%, Zo (a Zocdoc offering) is the only AI agent in our sample set that currently approaches human-like conversion rates. The next best two are converting at 33.3% and the last are converting at 19.1% and 10.9%, respectively.
How Do AI Agents Compare to Humans?
At first glance, human agents have a slight edge at 52% versus the top-performing AI agent in this initial analysis.
However, looking at conversion rates alone tells an incomplete story.
For starters, some AI agents answer 100% of calls, meaning they capture more opportunities from the same call volume simply by picking up the phone. Remember that “11% missed calls during business hours” stat…
Secondly, many AI agents escalate complex calls they can’t handle directly to practice staff. That gives human schedulers a second shot at converting the patient — boosting the total booking potential even more.
And then there’s the overall patient experience. Even if AI agents aren’t yet the smoothest or most effective at converting scheduling callers, instant 24/7 availability may make up for this in terms of patient satisfaction. This is why we recommend pairing objective conversion metrics with qualitative ones, like NPS or patient feedback, to get the full picture.
Next Steps
New patient call-to-appointment conversion rate is one of the clearest, most objective indicators of scheduling performance in healthcare. And at least so far, Zo by Zocdoc is leading the pack in that category. That said, there is significantly more to learn about this nascent technology, and we plan to publish more analyses as we gather additional data.
Also, while AI agents aren’t perfect, we can confidently recommend that practice groups at least explore this technology as a potential growth lever (especially those with high missed call rates). Rollover and after-hours configurations are great “best of both worlds” approaches if you aren’t ready to turn all your calls over to the bots.
Lastly, if you are a healthcare leader interested in tracking all the variables that impact your marketing efforts (AI agent related or not), reach out as we’d be happy to help 🙂.
Liine is an AI-powered call tracking, marketing analytics and ad optimization platform built for multisite healthcare, dental and vet practices. Our platform captures and analyzes all patient leads across calls, web forms and online bookings in one intuitive dashboard. This empowers healthcare marketers to auto-optimize ad campaigns, increase lead-to-appointment conversion rates and quickly identify which strategies are driving new patient bookings.