TeleVox sends 2,000 appointment reminders per month to your dental practice patients. No-show rate dropped from 18% to 9%. Recall campaigns bring back 15 patients per month for overdue cleanings. Excellent retention. But your practice lost 20 patients this month to relocation, insurance changes, and competition. Net change: minus 5 patients. TeleVox retained existing patients while the patient base still shrank because acquisition was not in the equation. The math is unforgiving — retention alone cannot sustain growth when outflow exceeds the patients you reactivate.
TL;DR
TeleVox retains patients. Retention without acquisition creates shrinking patient bases. The Webevo platform acquires new patients through SEO and reputation AND retains through CRM automation.
Retention Without Acquisition
Every practice loses 10-15% of patients annually through relocation, insurance changes, and competition. Retention tools maintain the 85-90% who stay. Growth tools replace the 10-15% who leave AND add new patients on top. Without acquisition, even perfect retention leads to a 10-15% annual decline.
Retention tools maintain your floor. Acquisition tools raise your ceiling. A practice with 800 patients losing 100 per year (12.5% attrition) and reactivating 15 per month via TeleVox recall campaigns recovers 180 patients per year — exceeding the 100 lost. But those are existing patients returning for overdue visits, not new patients entering your ecosystem. Your total patient base remains flat. Growth requires net new patients from marketing channels that TeleVox cannot provide.
Legacy Communication vs Growth Platform
| Function | TeleVox | Webevo Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Appointment reminders | ✅ Multi-channel | ✅ Automated |
| Recall campaigns | ✅ | ✅ AI-managed |
| New patient acquisition | ❌ | ✅ SEO + Reputation |
| Phone answering | ❌ | ✅ Voice AI 24/7 |
| Review generation | ❌ | ✅ AI-managed |
| Content marketing | ❌ | ✅ AI-generated |
| CRM pipeline | ❌ | ✅ AI-powered |
Single-Channel Voice Tools Miss the Growth System: Standalone voice AI tools answer calls — a critical capability. But voice AI reaches its full potential only when integrated with CRM (to track leads), reputation (to route review requests post-call), and SEO (to generate the calls in the first place). The Webevo platform integrates voice AI with every growth channel for compounding results.
The Revspring Acquisition and the Legacy Problem
TeleVox was acquired by Revspring, a healthcare billing and payment communications company. The acquisition deepened TeleVox's integration with revenue cycle management — statement delivery, payment reminders, financial communications. This makes TeleVox increasingly powerful for billing-adjacent communication and increasingly distant from growth marketing.
The platform's architecture reflects its history: batch messaging systems designed for appointment reminders and billing notices. Modern patient acquisition requires real-time responsiveness — answering a phone call within 2 seconds, responding to a web form within 30 seconds, sending a review request within 5 minutes of checkout. TeleVox's batch-oriented communication model was not built for this real-time growth loop.
Recall Is Not Discovery
Recall campaigns contact patients who already know your practice and have visited before. The reactivation message — "You're overdue for your cleaning" — works because there is existing trust and history. But recall cannot reach the person who just moved to your neighborhood, whose current dentist is 30 miles from their new home, and who is actively searching Google for "dentist near me." That person needs to discover your practice through SEO, assess your reputation through reviews, and book through voice AI or web. Recall systems operate within your existing patient database. Growth operates outside it.
When TeleVox Makes Sense
TeleVox fits established practices with strong acquisition channels needing specialized patient communication — particularly multi-location practices integrated with specific PMS/EHR systems where TeleVox has deep Revspring ecosystem partnerships. If your patient base is large, your recall campaigns are a significant revenue driver, and your acquisition comes through physician referrals or insurance panels, TeleVox adds retention infrastructure to an already-growing practice.
For practices needing new patient growth from digital channels — the Webevo platform provides acquisition AND retention together, replacing the need for a separate communication tool.
