Partner Story Β· in conversation with Phang Wei Jun, founder of Rekindle. This is a written interview submitted through Submit Your Story. The claims below are his own, presented as they were given to us. No payment was involved.
Phang Wei Jun, founder of Rekindle, Singapore. Photo supplied by Phang Wei Jun.
A dentist tells a patient to come back in six months. The patient means to. Then life gets busy, and the next appointment is never made.
Phang Wei Jun, usually known as Jun, noticed this during his own visit to the dentist. "It made me think about how easily people drift away between dental visits," he says. For the clinic, that is a lost booking from a relationship it has already spent time building. "The opportunity is sitting in its existing patient list."
Rekindle, his company in Singapore, operated by Fang Ventures Private Limited, exists to make that next conversation happen. It is a managed AI calling service for clinics and other appointment-based businesses: reminders, confirmations and reactivation calls to the patients and customers a business already has.
Why the calls don't get made
Jun's explanation of the problem is not about technology. It is about incentives.
A clinic owner has a financial reason to bring patients back. The reception staff usually do not. "Reception staff may have no bonus or specific target tied to recall calls," he says. "Their immediate work is looking after people at the counter, answering enquiries and keeping the day running."
So recall calls become the task that gets done whenever someone finds a spare moment, which is to say, not reliably. "When recall work has no protected time or clear measure of success, it is easy for it to slip. The process needs clear ownership, protected time and a measure of success."
That is the gap Rekindle is built to fill: not a smarter phone, but someone responsible for a piece of work that otherwise belongs to nobody.
What the AI does, and what it hands over
Rekindle uses conversational voice AI to make the routine calls and respond to what the person actually says. A patient might want to return, ask for a callback, decline, or raise a question that needs someone from the clinic.
For each workflow, Jun's team defines the purpose of the call, the information the agent is allowed to use, and the points where it must hand over. Every call ends with a structured outcome, so staff can see at a glance what needs their attention.
The dividing line is firm. "The dentist determines which follow-up is appropriate. Our role is to make the administrative conversation happen consistently. Clinical advice and treatment decisions stay with the clinic."
On its own site, the company puts it more bluntly: every workflow has a list of topics the agent will not touch and a named person those calls go to instead.
Managed, not self-serve
Plenty of tools let a business build its own voice bot. Rekindle deliberately isn't one of them.
"The work includes preparing the conversation, testing different replies, operating the campaign and reviewing the outcomes," Jun says. "The clinic does not need to build and maintain its own voice agent."
In practice, a client's customer list is usually a few thousand contacts. Rekindle schedules an approved recall campaign over a few days, with the pace set by the size of the list and the agreed calling hours. It places and tracks the calls, records each outcome, and passes the next steps to staff.
What the front desk gets back is not another list to dial. "Staff can then focus on interested patients, requested callbacks and exceptions. The aim is to give them a manageable set of next steps."
The money question
Pricing is a monthly managed-service fee plus per-minute call usage, quoted against scope rather than from a rate card. The pricing page explains what moves the number: connected talk time rather than call count, how many workflows run, how complex the conversation is, integrations, operating hours, and how fast a sensitive call must reach a person.
The comparison the company draws is not with another vendor. It is with the hours a front desk already spends on the phone. The site cites Singapore's Ministry of Manpower figures: a medical or dental receptionist's median gross wage is S$2,810 a month, about S$3,290 with employer CPF. Rekindle is careful to say it does not replace that person. What a workflow takes off them is the repetitive, scriptable share of the calls.
Where it stands today
Rekindle has paying customers and currently makes around 1,000 to 2,000 calls in an average month, Jun says.
Two clinic cases are published on the company's site. In the first, a Singapore dental clinic cut its outbound call time by more than 90% after Rekindle took over lapsed-patient calls and routine enquiries. In the second, a healthcare provider won back 40 or more staff hours a month on appointment confirmations.
Jun is precise about what those numbers are. "Those results relate to specific workflows and depend on the customer list." For a recall campaign, he says, the measures that matter are calls attempted, conversations held, patients interested in returning, and the bookings the clinic ultimately confirms. Sample calls, with transcripts, are on the site for anyone who wants to hear what a Rekindle conversation sounds like.
The lesson behind the business
The dentist visit changed how Jun thinks about retention in general.
"A business can put considerable effort into attracting a new customer, then leave the next conversation to chance."
His conclusion is one that applies well beyond clinics: a useful AI service has to take responsibility for a recurring piece of work, not just perform well in a demo. "A good conversation matters, but so does knowing who should be called, what happened and who follows up afterwards."
That, he says, is what Rekindle is for: "maintaining a relationship the business has already earned, with a clear handoff when a person is needed."
What comes next
The immediate focus is helping more Singapore clinics set up a reliable recall and follow-up process. After that, the same approach goes to other appointment-based businesses.
Jun would like to hear from clinic owners and operations managers who have an existing customer list they struggle to follow up consistently. Rekindle is at re-kindle.sg.
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This is a Partner Story: a written interview with a founder building with AI, submitted through Submit Your Story and published free of charge. Statements about the company's product, customers, results and pricing are its own. Building something with AI? Tell us about it.
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