Hey there! Chris here from Aeva AI Receptionist for Healthcare.
A physio told me something on a call this week that I haven’t been able to shake.
He runs a small clinic with no reception staff. For years he answered every call himself, because he believed that was the personal touch. That a real human on the phone was the thing that made his clinic feel like his clinic.
He shared that he’d been trying to answer calls while looking after his young daughter at home, half stressed, half present, and he realised that version of him on the phone was not the warm service he thought he was giving. It was a rushed man trying to do many things at once, and often missing the call entirely.
He'd been protecting the human touch by delivering the worst version of it.
The thing we get wrong about "human"
We treat human and automated as warm versus cold. It isn't that simple.
A receptionist who's flustered, back to back, or reaching for a ringing phone mid conversation is human. But it doesn’t mean it’s a great service. A patient on hold, or sent to voicemail at 5:30pm, is getting the human option. It still loses them.
Warmth isn't about whether a person picks up. It's about whether the patient feels looked after. Unhurried. Answered. Actually helped.
A clinic that answered every call, and still closed
The same physio told me about a clinic near where he used to work, up in Barnsley, UK.
They did reception properly, or so it looked. Cover on the desk from 8am till 8pm, a real person every time the phone rang. Twelve hours a day of the personal touch.
They went out of business. Not from missed calls. From the wage bill. The cost of having people sit there answering the phone, hour after hour, quietly outgrew what the clinic could bring in.
That's the part that stays with me. It never looked like failure. It looked like great service, right up until the numbers stopped working.
There's a point where more service stops being generous and starts being the thing that sinks you. A few honest questions worth sitting with before you get there:
What does answering every call actually cost you? Not the wage alone. The wage plus every hour someone is paid to wait for a phone that rings a handful of times.
Is the human touch you're proud of the real one, or the rushed one? Present and unhurried is warmth. Distracted and half there is just a person, and patients can tell the difference.
Is your front desk scaling with you, or capping you? If growth means adding a full salary just to keep answering the phone, that isn't a front desk. It's a ceiling.
The same gap, in the competition
Here's the thing that made this click for me.
Before he came to us, the same physio was weighing other AI receptionist tools. He asked them straight.
“Everyone tells me Aeva is the best at call answering, so how does yours compare?”
Their answer was that there's no real difference, theirs was just as good.
It wasn't. He'd already tried it, and he knew.
That's the exact same gap. A person who believes he's the personal touch while rushing through calls. Other AI products that say they're just as good until a real patient is on the line. In both cases the claim is sincere. It just doesn't survive contact with the actual call.
We can't do anything about what other people claim. What we can do is make sure that when a patient is actually on the phone, ours is the version that holds up. That gap, between what gets said and what a patient hears, is the one place we've poured everything.
Every call counts,
Chris Baxter
founder, Aeva AI Receptionist for healthcare
P.S. Have you ever caught yourself protecting the "human touch" in a way that was actually costing you? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
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