Ten questions to ask before choosing telephone cover
Before a Belgian dental practice hands its telephone to anyone, ten questions settle most of what matters: the hours covered and what happens outside them, the second caller, whether the appointment reaches your own diary, the languages, the emergency call, the recording and how long it is kept, the processing agreement, what you see afterwards, what the bill does when calls rise, and how to stop. Each of those has an answer that is precise and an answer that is a slogan, and the difference is easy to hear once you know what to listen for. The checklist works the same way on a human telesecretariat and on an AI agent. It also works on Tilcao, which is ours, and the last section answers all ten for Tilcao with the gaps printed as gaps.
Martin Michaux · Last updated
Which hours are covered, and who answers the second caller?
Ask both in the same breath, because together they decide how many calls actually get answered. The first question is about the clock. The second is about 09:10 on a Monday, when the line is already busy and another patient is ringing.
Ask for the hours as days and clock times, never as an adjective. “Extended hours” and “always there for your patients” are not hours. Ask specifically about Belgian public holidays and about the bridge days squeezed between a holiday and the weekend, because those are exactly the days the practice is shut and patients ring anyway.
Then ask what a caller hears at 22:00 on a Tuesday. Voicemail is a legitimate answer if it is stated as one, and so is an out-of-hours message with a number on it. An unanswered ring is not, and a provider who has not thought about it will tell you so by hesitating.
| The question, as you should ask it | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| “Exactly which hours are covered, and what does a caller get outside them? What about public holidays and bridge days?” | Days and clock times, said without being pushed. A named behaviour for every hour that is not covered, including holidays and bridge days. An offer to let you ring the line yourself at 21:00 and hear it. | “Extended hours.” “We are always there.” “24/7 support”, where support turns out to mean a help desk for you rather than someone answering your patients. |
| “What happens to the second caller while the first is still on the line?” | A concrete mechanism. Either a stated number of calls answered at once, or an honest queue with what the caller hears and how long they wait before it gives up. | “That hardly ever happens.” Silence, or a change of subject to average answer times. The second caller is the call you are buying cover for, so an answer that avoids it is the whole answer. |
Does the appointment land in our diary, and in which language?
Ask whether the appointment is written into the practice’s own diary, or relayed to you as a message asking someone to ring the patient back. A message is not a booking. It is a task, and the practice still has to do it, which is most of the work you were trying to hand over.
The Belgian detail matters here more than anywhere. No Belgian dental practice system publishes an open, documented booking interface, so a provider claiming a native integration with everything is claiming something that deserves a follow-up question. Ask which route into your agenda they use, ask which appointment types they may create and which they never will, and ask whether they check real availability or write into a block of telephone slots that somebody re-keys afterwards. Then ask to watch a booking appear in your own diary during the demo call rather than hearing that it would.
Then the languages. A language list on a website is the set of languages a company can supply somewhere, not the set that is answered at 18:40 on a Friday. In Belgium that gap is the whole question. Ask which languages are answered at which hours, ask what happens when a caller changes language halfway through a sentence, and ask whether the provider knows the words a Belgian patient actually uses: mutualiteit or mutualité for the sickness fund, geconventioneerd or conventionné for a dentist bound to the national tariff agreement, derdebetaler for billing the fund directly.
| The question, as you should ask it | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| “Is the appointment written into our own diary during the call, or relayed to us as a message to call the patient back?” | Names the route, names the appointment types it may book, says plainly where no route exists yet and what happens instead. Shows you a booking landing in a test diary while you watch. | “Fully integrated with all major systems”, with no system named. “Two-way sync” that turns out to be an email. A demo that ends before anything is written anywhere. |
| “Which languages, and does that mean somebody who speaks it natively at the moment my patient rings, or a translation?” | Language by language, hour by hour. A clear answer on switching language mid-call. Belgian vocabulary used correctly and unprompted, including the difference between a full and a partial convention. | “All languages.” “Multilingual team.” A French that is Parisian and a Dutch that is from the Netherlands. A language list that is available on request rather than on the page. |
NIC/CIN list of MyCareNet-approved Belgian dental software, version of 10 March 2026
A patient rings in pain. What happens, and who decides?
Ask for the sequence, step by step, and ask who makes the judgement. The safe answer is that nobody at the front desk makes a clinical judgement at all. A receptionist, human or AI, gathers facts and routes the call on a rule the practice wrote. Anything sold to you as triage at the front desk is somebody else’s liability being moved onto your name.
Ask the provider to read you the escalation rule as it is configured today, and ask to see it as a document you can edit yourself. A rule you cannot change is the provider’s rule, and you are the one who carries it. Ask what the caller hears when the rule fires, whether the number is repeated, and what reaches you afterwards.
Then ask about out of hours, because Belgian cover has a real hole in it and a provider who knows that has worked here. The dental duty rota, the wachtdienst in Dutch and the garde dentaire in French, runs on weekends, public holidays and bridge days rather than on ordinary weekdays. The Dutch-language line for Flanders and Brussels is 0903 39 969, open on those days from 09:00 to 18:00 and charged at a premium rate. Brussels has its own French-language garde on 02 426 10 26. Wallonia publishes no single number at all, only a map that goes live during duty periods. Alongside those sit 1733 for out-of-hours general practice and 112 for an emergency. A patient in pain at 21:00 on a Tuesday is outside your opening hours and outside the rota at the same time, so ask what the provider does in exactly that minute.
| The question, as you should ask it | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| “A patient rings in pain at 21:00 on a Tuesday. Talk me through what happens, and tell me who decides.” | You decide, and the rule is yours to write and to change. No condition named, no urgency judged, no medicine recommended or dosed, nothing promised about a prescription. Booking stops, your routing is read out, the number is repeated, a named person is told. The Belgian duty arrangements are described correctly without being looked up. | “Our agents are trained to triage.” “The system assesses urgency.” A promise to reach the dentist personally with no description of how. A duty rota described as running every night, which it does not. |
Are calls recorded, and will you show us the processing agreement?
Ask both before the demo rather than after the contract. A dental telephone call is special-category health data under Article 9 of the GDPR, because a reason for visit, a pain complaint or a medication list is health information. That turns the recording question from a preference into a legal one, and it is the reason the answers have to be specific.
Belgian law does not forbid recording a conversation you are party to, and a practice is a party to its own patient calls. Article 314bis §2 of the Strafwetboek and the Code pénal punishes the use of a lawfully made recording with fraudulent intent or with intent to harm. Telecom rules and the GDPR then apply on top, cumulatively: every participant, the patient included, has to be told before the recording starts what is recorded, for what purpose, and for how long it is kept. Ask the provider to read you that opening sentence word for word, in each language they answer in.
Then ask for the agreement itself. Your practice is the controller and the provider is the processor, so an Article 28 processing agreement has to exist before the first real patient call, with an annex naming every sub-processor, what it does and the region it processes in. Ask who at the provider can read a transcript, under what written confidentiality obligation, and whether that access is logged. Professional secrecy under Article 458 of the Strafwetboek and the Code pénal binds you and extends to the people who work for you, and it does not stop at a supplier’s door.
| The question, as you should ask it | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| “Are calls recorded? Where does the recording sit, and for how long? What about the transcript and the summary?” | Yes or no, said plainly. A region named for each component. A retention period per data type, given as days or months, with the audio usually on the shortest clock. The disclosure sentence read out to you. | “Stored securely in the cloud.” “Retained as long as necessary.” A single retention period covering audio, transcript and summary together, which usually means nobody has looked. |
| “Will you send me your processing agreement and your sub-processor list now, before I commit to anything?” | It arrives the same day, unprompted, with an annex that names each sub-processor and its region, a breach notification timeframe in hours, and a dated changelog when the list changes. | “We are fully GDPR compliant”, offered as a badge instead of a document. “Legal will send it at contract stage.” An annex that says “various cloud providers”. |
Belgian Data Protection Authority on sensitive data, including health data
What do we see afterwards, what does it cost when calls rise, and how do we stop?
These three tend to get asked after six months instead of before, which is the wrong order. Ask what you will see of a call you did not hear, ask what the bill does in a busy month, and ask how the arrangement ends, all while they still want your signature.
On visibility, the useful test is whether the record is derived from the diary or from the conversation. A summary that says an appointment was booked because the operator or the agent said so will drift away from reality, quietly, in the direction that flatters the provider. One derived from what was actually written to the diary cannot. Ask to see a single redacted record with the fields in it, rather than a screenshot of a dashboard.
On cost, do not ask for a headline figure. Ask which unit is charged, and then ask what counts as a chargeable call: a wrong number, a caller who hangs up after four seconds, a call handed straight to a person, a patient who rings twice about the same appointment. Ask what happens above the bundle, and ask for the quote to be built against your own last three months of telephone records rather than against an average practice, which is nobody.
On stopping, the exit tells you how the whole relationship will run. Ask for the notice period as a number of days, ask whether you can point your own number back yourself without ringing them, ask what you get as an export and in what format, and ask what is deleted, when, and whether you get that in writing.
| The question, as you should ask it | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| “After a call we did not hear, what do we actually see of what was said and what was done?” | A structured summary per conversation and an audit trail, with the booking outcome derived from what reached the diary. A redacted example handed over on the spot. | “You get an email.” A dashboard of call counts with no content behind it. A summary that reports a booking that never reached any diary. |
| “What happens to the bill when our call volume goes up? What exactly counts as a chargeable call?” | The unit named, the chargeable events listed including the awkward ones, the behaviour above a bundle stated, and any mid-term change tied to a notice period. | “It depends on your needs.” A low headline with the overage in a footnote. A quote built on an average practice rather than on your own telephone records. |
| “How do we stop, and what happens to our data when we do?” | A notice period as a number of days. You keep and control your own number. An export in a readable format, then deletion of audio, transcripts and summaries, confirmed in writing on a date. | Automatic renewal with a long written-notice window. Data “available on request”. No way to take the line back without their help, which is not an exit, it is a lock. |
Ask us the same ten questions
This checklist is meant to be used on Tilcao as well. A list of questions written by a supplier that quietly exempts the supplier is not a checklist, it is a brochure with numbered headings, and any reader spots it in about ten seconds. So here are our own answers, as they stand on the date at the foot of this page.
Tilcao is early and pre-pilot. Three of the ten answers below are gaps rather than claims, and they are printed as gaps rather than written around. If one of them changes, it changes here and the date changes with it.
| The question | What Tilcao answers today |
|---|---|
| Hours, and outside them | Every hour, including nights, weekends, public holidays and bridge days. There is no unstaffed window, because there is no shift. |
| The second caller | Answered at the same time, on the same number. Callers do not queue behind each other. |
| Diary or message | Written into the practice’s own software on real availability, during the call, where a route into your agenda exists. Where one does not exist yet we say so and leave a structured task instead. Tilcao is not a practice management system and is not on the MyCareNet approved-software list. |
| Languages | Dutch, French and English on the same line at every hour, including when the caller changes language mid-sentence. The voice is chosen by ear per language, so a Flemish patient does not get a Netherlands voice. |
| The emergency call | No clinical judgement of any kind. The agent never names a condition, never judges urgency, never recommends or doses a medicine, and never promises a prescription. On a red flag it stops booking, reads out the routing you wrote, repeats the number twice and hands over to a named person where one is reachable. |
| Recording and retention | Calls are recorded, and the caller is told in the opening sentence, together with the fact that they are speaking to an AI. Processing is in the EU and the EEA, with every sub-processor named by region in the annex. Gap: no retention number is published yet, because the periods are agreed per practice and written into the agreement as days and months. |
| The processing agreement | An Article 28 agreement before the first real patient call, sent to you before you commit to anything, with an annex naming every sub-processor and what it does. Gap: Tilcao holds no security certification and does not claim one. |
| What you see afterwards | A structured summary and an audit trail for every conversation, with the booking outcome derived from what was actually written to the diary rather than from what the agent said on the call. |
| Cost when volume rises | Gap: no published price. Tilcao is pre-pilot, and pricing is set per practice on a call after looking at your own call volume and agenda setup. A figure published before we have measured one would be a guess. |
| Stopping | You keep your own number and can take the line back yourself without asking us. Workflows can be paused. On ending, your data is exported, and the audio, transcripts and summaries are deleted, with the audit trail keeping the fact of the deletion rather than its content. |
How to run the checklist without spending a week on it
Put the ten questions in an email and send the same email to every provider on your list. Answers in writing are comparable, and a provider who will only answer by telephone has told you something before saying anything.
Then test the two answers that cannot be verified on paper. Ring the line yourself, late, in your second language, and switch language halfway through a sentence. Ring it twice at once from two mobiles and see what the second caller gets. Both tests take five minutes and settle more than an hour of demonstration.
One last thing worth knowing before the calls start. Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires that a person be informed they are interacting with an AI system unless that is already obvious. An appointment-booking agent is not a high-risk system under that regulation, and a provider claiming a high-risk conformity assessment for one is describing something that was not required of them. Ask instead for the disclosure sentence, and listen to whether it sounds like something you would be happy for your own patients to hear.
Questions practices ask
What should I ask a telesecretariat before signing?
The same ten questions you would ask an AI provider, because the risks sit in the same places. The ones that separate services quickly are the exact hours covered, what happens to the second caller, and whether the appointment is written into your diary or relayed as a message for you to action. Ask for the answers in writing, then test the line yourself outside office hours.
How do I know whether an answering service really books into my diary?
Watch it happen. Ask for a demo where a booking is written into a test diary while you are looking at the diary, not at their screen. Then ask which appointment types the service may create, which it may never create, and what it does when your agenda offers nothing suitable. A service that leaves a message for you to ring the patient back is a message service, which is a reasonable thing to buy as long as you know that is what you are buying.
Is a data processing agreement required for a dental answering service in Belgium?
Yes. Your practice is the controller and the provider is the processor, so an Article 28 processing agreement has to be in place before the first real patient call. A dental call is special-category health data under Article 9 of the GDPR, so the agreement needs an annex naming every sub-processor and the region it processes in, a retention period per data type as a number, and a breach notification timeframe. Ask to read it before you commit rather than at signature.
Do patients have to be told they are speaking to an AI?
Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026 and requires a person to be informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless that is obvious to a reasonably observant person. Ask any AI provider to read you their opening sentence word for word, in each language they answer in. Ask as well what happens when a caller says they would rather speak to a person, because a disclosure with no alternative is not much of a choice.
Can an answering service handle a dental emergency call?
It can handle the call. It should not make the clinical judgement. The right shape is that the practice writes the rule, and the service follows it: stop booking, state the routing, repeat the number, hand over to a named person. Ask to see that rule as a document you can edit, and ask how the service describes the Belgian duty arrangements, which run on weekends, public holidays and bridge days rather than on ordinary weekdays.
How long should a provider keep recordings of patient calls?
Shorter than your clinical file, and on separate clocks for the audio, the transcript and the structured summary. There is no single legal number, which is exactly why the provider should give you theirs as days or months rather than as a phrase. A retention clause that says only “as long as necessary” is not a retention clause, and a single period covering audio and transcripts together usually means nobody has thought about it.
What does telephone cover cost for a Belgian dental practice?
It varies too much for a useful figure, which is why the more productive question is about the shape of the bill rather than its size. Ask which unit is charged, what counts as a chargeable call, what happens above any bundle, and whether the rate can change mid-term. Then ask for the quote to be built against your own last three months of telephone records. Tilcao publishes no price, because it is pre-pilot and a figure we have not measured would be a guess.
Can I test a provider before I sign anything?
Yes, and the tests that matter take about five minutes. Ring the line late in the evening and hear what a patient hears. Ring it in your second language and switch language halfway through a sentence. Ring twice at once from two mobiles and see what the second caller gets. Ask for one redacted record of a call afterwards, so you can see what you would actually be given.