What a missed call actually costs you

Everyone in this trade has been told that missed calls cost money. Almost nobody has been told what it costs them, which is the only version of that sentence worth anything.

So here is the arithmetic. It takes about two minutes and it uses figures you already know, rather than a percentage borrowed from somebody else’s industry report.

The four numbers

You need four things, and you can estimate all of them:

1. Calls you miss in a normal week. Not calls you get — calls that ring out. Your phone knows this. Look at the last seven days.
2. How many of those were somebody wanting work done. Not suppliers, not your accountant. Be honest and be conservative.
3. What a typical job is worth to you. Your average invoice, not your best one.
4. How often you win a job once you are actually talking to somebody. Most trades know this instinctively. If you have no idea, use half.

The sum

Missed calls that were work × the share you would have won × your average job

That is the number, per week. Multiply by fifty to get the year.

A worked example, with made-up figures so you can see the shape of it: six missed calls a week, four of them genuine enquiries, an average job of $400, and you close half the conversations you actually have. That is 4 × 0.5 × $400 = $800 a week, or roughly $40,000 a year.

Those numbers are illustrative. Yours will be different — possibly much lower, possibly much higher if you do bigger jobs. The point is not the example, it is that you can put your own four numbers in and get an answer you actually believe, which no statistic can do for you.

Why the number is usually worse than people expect

Two things make it bigger than the raw call count suggests.

The first person to answer usually wins. Somebody with a burst pipe is not leaving a voicemail and waiting. They are working down the search results. By the time you have finished the job you were on, listened to the voicemail and rung back, the work is often already booked with somebody else — not because they were cheaper or better reviewed, but because they picked up.

Your voicemail undercounts the problem. Think about your own behaviour: when a business does not pick up, how often do you actually leave a message, and how often do you just try the next number? Your customers are no different. If you are measuring lost enquiries by how many messages are sitting on your phone, you are measuring a fraction of it.

What actually closes the gap

Not answering more calls. You cannot answer the phone from under a sink, and nobody should be asking you to.

What closes it is the enquiry not going cold in the ninety seconds after it rings out. An automatic text — “Sorry we missed you, this is [business]. What do you need?” — turns a lost call into a text thread that is still open when you climb out. The customer is not left holding a decision; they are already in a conversation with you.

That is one of the fourteen things included in what we run for small businesses. The rest of it is on the pricing page, with the number published.

If you want to see the text-back working on a real account rather than read about it, book thirty minutes. No obligation, and the price is on the site either way.