Old-school answering services take a message and email/text it to the practice. By the time the front desk calls back the next morning, 60-70% of those callers have booked somewhere else. Modern AI front desks book the appointment in real time during the call — which is the whole point. If a vendor can't show you a live booking happening, they're selling you an answering service with extra steps.
Dental: Open Dental, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Curve, Denticon. Medical: athenahealth, AdvancedMD, DrChrono. Trades: ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge. Real estate: Follow Up Boss, Sierra Interactive, kvCORE, BoomTown. General: Acuity, Calendly, Square Appointments, GoHighLevel. Ask any vendor 'show me a live booking into [your specific PMS]' — not a demo screenshot, a recording from a real customer's system.
Custom PMS or self-built schedulers: integration takes 2-4 weeks of custom dev. Very old systems with no API: screen-scraping fallback works but is fragile. Multi-location practices with different schedulers per location: doable but requires per-location routing logic. Always disclose your stack on the discovery call so the vendor can give you a real timeline.
Booking accuracy = % of calls that produced a confirmed appointment in your PMS. Industry benchmark for AI front desks: 75-90% accuracy on inquiry calls. The 10-25% miss usually breaks down: caller didn't want to book, AI hit an edge case the script didn't cover, or PMS sync failed. All three are addressable in the first 30 days of tuning.
Before signing: ask the vendor for a 7-day trial running on your real calls (most reputable vendors offer this), pull the booking accuracy report at day 7, compare against your own front desk's accuracy on the same call types. The numbers usually surprise both directions. Hear ours live: +1 (877) 640-3761. Run your own math: free 5-min audit.