Some hours are simply better for reaching people. Smart Timing finds yours.
Turn it on for an AI campaign and FrontDesk watches every call it places — the hour it went out in the patient's own timezone, whether a person picked up, and whether it led to a booking or a transfer. It starts from what works for practices like yours, sharpens as your own calls come in, and once it is confident, quietly dials more in the hours that connect and less in the ones that don't.
It never changes whether you call. It changes when, inside the fence you already drew.
Smart Timing is part of outbound campaigns (a Pro feature) and works with AI agent campaigns. Staff-mode campaigns are driven by "Call Next," so there is nothing for it to pace.
One thing changes the moment you turn it on
A campaign without Smart Timing dials one call every few minutes until it hits the daily limit — 60 calls four minutes apart is finished by lunch. With Smart Timing on, the same daily limit is spread across your whole window (evenly while learning, then leaning into the best hours once applied). Same number of calls per day; they just stop piling into the morning. If your team prefers "get the calls done early," keep it off.
Turn it on
When you create a campaign — on the When can these calls go out? step, choose Smart Timing on (the default for AI campaigns) or Even pacing.
On an existing campaign — either:
- open the campaign and press Turn on in the Smart Timing card, or
- open Campaign settings → When calls go out → Find the best times to call.
Under the switch there is one option: Apply automatically when ready (on by default). Leave it on and Smart Timing applies its recommendation itself and sends you a notification; turn it off and it recommends on the campaign page and waits for you to press Apply.
Turning it on also adds your anonymous pick-up rates to the pool that helps every practice in your specialty start smarter — see What leaves your practice.
How it learns
Smart Timing moves through three states. You'll see the current one as a chip on the campaign page and on the campaign card.
| State | What's happening |
|---|---|
| Learning | Your daily calls are spread evenly across your whole window. Every call adds to the picture. The card shows the best times so far and how many calls until the picture gets sharper. |
| Ready to apply | Only shown when Apply automatically is off. Smart Timing is confident it has found a better allocation and is waiting for you to press Apply. |
| Optimizing | The learned allocation is live: the campaign dials more densely in the strong hours and more sparsely in the weak ones. It keeps learning and can refine itself again after a week. |
It starts with a head start
On day one — before your campaign has placed a single call — the card already shows a starting point. That comes from the pool: the pick-up patterns of other practices in your specialty. If your specialty's pool is still small, it uses the pattern across all FrontDesk practices; failing that, a general industry pattern (midweek, late morning and late afternoon do best). The card tells you which one it started from.
As your own calls arrive, they pull the estimate away from that starting point. After a few hundred calls the picture is mostly yours; after a couple of thousand it's almost entirely yours.
It only claims what it can back up
Two days of calls can tell you mornings beat afternoons. They cannot tell you Tuesday at 10 beats Thursday at 4. So Smart Timing sharpens its claim in steps:
- Time of day — mornings, midday, late afternoons, evenings (pooled across all days).
- Hour of day — still pooled across weekdays. Unlocks around 200 calls.
- Weekday × time of day — unlocks around 2,000 calls.
- Day and hour — the full grid. Unlocks around 10,000 calls.
The progress bar on the card shows how far you are from the next step. Recent calls count for more than old ones — a call from two months ago carries about a quarter of the weight of one from this week — so a campaign that has changed its list or script isn't stuck with stale conclusions.
It corrects for who you were calling
Campaign dialers work the highest-value, freshest contacts first. That means your first hour of dialing always looks great — not because of the hour, but because of who was in it. Smart Timing accounts for this: it compares like with like (first attempts against first attempts, existing patients against cold contacts) and, a small share of the time, dials a random eligible contact instead of the next-best one so the hour and the person are never tangled together.
When it applies
Smart Timing only changes your pacing when two things are true:
- it is at least 90% sure the new allocation beats what you have now, and
- it expects a meaningful lift (at least a few percent more pick-ups).
Until then the campaign runs evenly. Once it applies, it waits at least a week before refining again, and always keeps dialing a little in the hours it turned down so it can notice if they improve.
Reading the Smart Timing card
The card sits at the top of every AI campaign page.
- Headline — the best time so far ("Best so far: 10 AM–11 AM") or, once applied, what it leaned into.
- Learning from N calls — every AI campaign call your practice has placed counts, not just this campaign's, so a new campaign inherits what you've already learned. The granularity it's showing follows.
- Progress bar — calls until the next level of detail.
- Top 3 times — with the pick-up rate and how many of your own calls back it up. "Estimate" means it's still mostly the starting point.
- Heatmap — every day and hour, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., in the patient's local time. Darker green = more pick-ups. Faded cells are outside your call windows. Hover any cell for the numbers. Cells outlined in green are the current #1 group.
- Status line — what it will do next: apply itself when confident, wait for you, or (once applied) the expected lift, the observed lift once it has measured it, and an Undo button.
- Show changes — every apply, undo, on and off, with a timestamp and whether it was automatic.
The refresh icon re-runs the analysis on the spot; otherwise it refreshes about every half hour and after every apply.
Apply and undo
- Apply (when Apply automatically is off and the status is Ready) — press it, confirm, and the campaign starts leaning into the learned hours.
- Undo — appears whenever an allocation is live. Pacing returns to even across your windows immediately, and Smart Timing holds off for a week before it can apply again. The undo is logged in Show changes.
- Turn off — from the card or Campaign settings. Weights are cleared, the campaign runs evenly, and your call history is kept so switching it back on later picks up where it left off.
What "leaning into" means in practice: a bigger share of the day's calls is scheduled into the strong hours and a smaller share into the weak ones — a weak hour still gets some calls (never less than about a third of an average hour) so Smart Timing can notice if it improves. Your daily limit, time between calls, and call blocks still cap everything.
It measures itself
About 15% of calls are always placed on an even schedule regardless of what was learned. That slice is the control group: once there are enough calls in both groups, the card shows the observed lift — "+9% pick-ups vs. the control slice" — next to the lift it expected. If the observed number is negative, undo.
Callbacks count
If a patient you called rings the practice back within three days, Smart Timing treats that as a pick-up for the call that prompted it. If they book on that callback, it's a booking for that call too — and the campaign marks the contact Booked so the dialer stops calling them.
Credit always goes to the hour you dialed, never the hour they called back. A 6 p.m. voicemail that produces a 9 a.m. callback is a point for 6 p.m.
What it never does
- Never widens your windows. It only re-balances inside the calling days and blocks you set. Want evenings considered? Add an evening block in Campaign settings first.
- Never overrides calling rules. The 8 a.m.–9 p.m. rule in the patient's local time, restricted-state handling, do-not-call lists, and opt-outs all sit underneath it.
- Never changes who you call or what the AI says. Only the pacing across hours.
- Never applies silently. Automatic applies send a notification; every change is in the log and can be undone.
What leaves your practice
When Smart Timing is on, your campaigns contribute anonymous counts to the pool for your specialty: for each day-of-week and hour, how many calls went out, how many were picked up, how many booked. Nothing else — no names, no phone numbers, no individual calls, no transcripts. One large practice can't dominate the pool (each practice's contribution is capped), and the pool is only used once several practices have contributed.
That pool is what lets a brand-new campaign start from a sensible pattern on day one instead of guessing.
Good to know
- It's practice-wide. Every AI campaign at a location learns from the same call history, so your second campaign starts where your first left off.
- Duplicating a campaign copies the switch (on or off) but not the learned pacing — the copy starts in learning mode with the practice's history.
- Multiple locations learn separately; each has its own patients and its own pattern.
- Mixed timezones are fine. Everything is measured in the patient's local time, resolved from their address (or their area code when there's no address on file).