Why Vet Clinics Lose New Clients on the Phone

Somebody just moved to your town with a two-year-old beagle. They search for vets nearby, look at three clinics, and call the one with the best reviews. It rings eight times and goes to voicemail. They call the second one, sit on hold for six minutes, and hang up. The third one answers. That clinic now has a patient for the next decade.

This is not a guess about how new clients behave. It is close to what researchers measured when they called more than five thousand US veterinary practices in 2025.

What did the JAVMA secret-shopper study find?

The study, by Aggarwal, Ramirez-Guillen and Haeder, was published online in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association on September 17, 2025. Callers posing as owners of a healthy dog contacted 5,053 general veterinary practices across six states between February and April 2025 and tried to book a preventive wellness visit. They got an appointment in 67.0% of attempts.

The interesting part is why the other third failed. The primary reasons were inability to connect with staff, in 15.1% of attempts, excessive hold times, in 8.2%, and staff refusal, in 1.9%. Only 3.9% failed because the veterinarians had no capacity for new patients. In other words, a clinic that had room for the dog lost the booking about six times as often to the phone itself as to a full schedule.

Two caveats keep this honest. The study measured new-client wellness calls during business hours, not all of a clinic’s call traffic. And the hold-time cutoff was five minutes, which some owners would wait past and many would not. Even so, it is the largest independent measurement of veterinary phone access available, and it is peer-reviewed rather than vendor data.

Why can’t callers get through during business hours?

Because the people answering the phone are also doing everything else at the front desk. Checking in patients, taking payments, handling a difficult conversation in the lobby and answering the phone all draw on the same two or three people, and the phone is the only one of those tasks that can be ignored without anyone in the building noticing.

Turnover makes it worse. AAHA’s CEO told AVMA News in March 2024 that average annual turnover among veterinary team members was 23% and increasing, and AAHA’s survey of more than 14,000 small-animal practice staff found that 30% of clinical professionals planned to leave their current position within a year. AAHA’s 2020 compensation data put receptionist turnover at 32.5%, the highest of any role in the practice. Every departure means weeks of a short-handed desk and a phone that rings out more often.

How much is a lost new client worth?

Vetsource data from 6,000 practices, reported by AVMA News in October 2024, put average annual revenue per patient at $622. The same data showed new clients down 8.6% year over year and new puppy and kitten patients down 9%, while the average time between visits had stretched from 57.6 days to 85.8 days. When fewer new clients are coming in and existing ones visit less often, each new client a clinic does win matters more.

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers. If your clinic misses four new-client calls a week and half of those callers would have booked, that is about 100 new clients a year. At $622 each, that is more than $60,000 in first-year revenue, before counting the years that follow. Your numbers will differ, but the shape of the calculation rarely does.

What do pet owners say about booking?

Owner surveys point the same way, though they come from vendors and deserve that label. A PetDesk survey of 1,000 North American pet owners, published in March 2025, found that 57% had experienced difficulty booking appointments at their vet clinic and 31% were likely to switch clinics, rising to 40% among younger owners. PetDesk sells client communication software, so treat the figures as directional. They line up with what the independent JAVMA study measured directly.

How do clinics stop losing new clients on the phone?

• Measure first. Most phone systems log unanswered calls. Pull a month of data and look at when calls ring out. In most clinics, the misses cluster in the morning rush and at lunch.
• Put new-client calls first. A new client calling to book is worth more to the practice than most other calls in the queue. Some clinics give new-client enquiries a separate line or menu option.
• Cut hold times below five minutes. The JAVMA study used five minutes as its cutoff for a failed call. If your holds regularly run longer, callers are hanging up.
• Offer another way to book. Online scheduling, text booking, or an answering layer that captures the request all reduce the number of callers who give up.

An AI answering service is one of those layers. SaveMyCalls answers every call that rings out, captures the new client’s details and the pet’s name, species and reason for visit, and texts them to your team to confirm, so the beagle owner in the first paragraph is never sent to voicemail. Our veterinary answering page has the details.

When is this not your problem?

If your schedule is booked weeks out and you are already turning new clients away, answering more calls will produce a longer waitlist, not more revenue. And if your call logs show almost no unanswered calls, your new-client problem is somewhere else: visibility in search, reviews, or price. Fix what the data says is broken.

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