The permission slip your front desk needed just arrived. A Zenoti survey of more than 1,100 U.S. med spa clients, published November 3, 2025, found that 71% of regular med spa clients are comfortable interacting with an AI receptionist. Thirty-nine percent said they are "very comfortable." Only 13% said they wouldn't be comfortable at all. Meanwhile, the average med spa answers somewhere between 55 and 65% of its inbound calls during business hours, and almost none evenings or weekends. So you have a customer base that is ready for AI, and a phone system that is failing a third of the people who call. The ROI conversation is already over.
I've been in front-desk conversations with med spa owners for a couple of years now, and the objection I hear most is some version of "our clients are different, they want the personal touch." I understand the instinct. When you are selling $800 filler appointments to clients who have been coming to you for five years, you want to believe the relationship is the product. It is, partly. But the survey data says your clients want the relationship AND they want to book at 10pm on a Tuesday without leaving a voicemail. Those two things are not in conflict. One of them just requires a decision.
What the survey actually found
Zenoti surveyed more than 1,100 U.S. med spa clients, focusing specifically on "regulars," meaning frequent visitors with established relationships. Four findings stand out for owners.
First, 73% of regulars said they prefer medspas that offer after-hours support, and 82% said they would be more likely to rebook if booking options were available 24/7. That is not a nice-to-have. That is a retention lever.
Second, 89% of regulars say limited booking hours are frustrating. Sixty-two percent said they find them "very or extremely" frustrating. And here is the one that should keep you up at night: 79% have skipped booking altogether because it was too hard to reach someone. Not complained. Not left a voicemail. Skipped. Meaning the appointment never happened and you never knew you lost it.
Third, the phone still matters. Eighty-three percent of regulars said calling is usually the easiest way to update an appointment. The point is not to kill the phone. The point is to make sure someone, or something, picks it up.
Fourth, and most interesting to me: comfort with AI peaks among the 45 to 60 age group, at 80%. That is your highest-spending, most loyal demographic. The people who were supposed to be the hardest to convince are the most open. Go figure.
Name the gap, then you can close it
Here is the one idea I want you to walk away with, and it has a name: the Answered Call Gap. It is the distance between the calls coming in and the calls being handled. In med spa terms, Zenoti's industry data puts the average at 35 to 45% of calls going unanswered during business hours. After hours, it is close to 100%. The Answered Call Gap is not a phone problem, it is a revenue problem. Every unanswered call is a client who went back to their browser and booked somewhere else, or just didn't book at all.
I have seen this play out in a different context. We built an AI receptionist system for an orthodontic practice that was missing roughly 40 calls a month, many of them from parents calling after school pickup, between 3 and 6pm, when the front desk was slammed with check-ins. The calls were not being ignored on purpose. There just were not enough hands. Closing the Answered Call Gap in that practice did not replace the front desk. It made the front desk's job easier on the calls that actually needed a human. That is the real pitch for AI here: not replacement, coverage.
If you want to go deeper on what AI front-desk coverage actually looks like for a service business, TPC Scottsdale's AI receptionist rollout is worth a read. Different industry, same problem, same logic.
What this means for your business right now
If you run a med spa, or manage one, this survey says your clients have already moved. They are not waiting for you to get comfortable with AI. They are waiting for you to answer the phone.
The tools that handle this are not experimental anymore. AI receptionists built for service businesses can answer calls, confirm bookings, handle reschedules, manage a waitlist, and suggest add-on services based on a client profile. The category is real and the pricing has come down considerably. You are not looking at a six-figure integration. You are looking at a monthly SaaS fee that is a fraction of what you lose in missed appointments.
The survey also makes clear that accuracy is the baseline expectation (55% of all med spa clients ranked it first) and speed is what regulars reward. If your AI system books the wrong service or double-schedules a treatment room, you lose trust fast. So the setup matters. The hand-off between AI and human staff matters. And the disclosure question matters too: clients who feel tricked by an undisclosed AI have a different reaction than clients who simply got a fast, accurate confirmation. The disclosure conversation is worth having before you deploy, not after.
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Under the hood
For the technical reader: what Zenoti is describing aligns with what the broader AI receptionist category calls "conversational IVR with CRM integration." The good systems are not phone trees. They are large language model-based voice agents that pull from your booking software in real time, understand natural language, and hand off to a human when the conversation requires judgment. The differentiator is not the voice quality, which is now very good across vendors. It is the integration depth with your practice management system and how gracefully the agent escalates. A system that gets stuck on a question and loops is worse than voicemail. Test the edge cases in the demo, not just the happy path.
What to do this week
One: Pull your call answer rate. If your phone system does not report it, ask your front desk to log missed calls for one week. You need a real number, not a guess, before you can close the gap.
Two: Run the after-hours test. Call your own practice at 7pm on a Friday. Whatever happens is what your clients experience. I promise it is more instructive than any vendor demo.
Three: If you are evaluating AI receptionist tools, do not let the vendor run the demo. Give them a scenario your front desk actually deals with, a client calling to reschedule a filler appointment two days out during a busy week. See what the system does. The demo tax is what you pay when you let the vendor pick the questions.
Four: Check the disclosure language. Know what your AI will say if a client asks whether they're talking to a person. Have that answer before you go live, not after a client posts about it.
You can skip this if...
Your practice has a fully staffed front desk that answers every call, including evenings and weekends, with zero dropped calls and a waitlist that manages itself. In that case, you have already solved the problem this survey is describing. Most of you do not have that practice, but if you do, you can move on.
One last thing
The 45 to 60 age group being the most comfortable with AI is the number I keep thinking about. That cohort lived through the ATM replacing the bank teller, the self-checkout replacing the cashier, and OpenTable replacing the reservation line. They are not afraid of technology that works. They are only afraid of technology that wastes their time. The question your med spa has to answer is not "are our clients ready for AI." The survey settled that. The question is whether your AI is good enough to deserve their trust.
What would your answer rate look like if you checked it right now?
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