What a missed call actually costs

Most businesses I talk to have a rough idea how many calls they miss. What they do not know is what that costs over a year. The number is uncomfortable, and it takes five minutes to work out.

The caller does not wait#

Somebody calling a trade business has a problem they want solved now. The heating is off, the car is making a noise, the door will not close. When nobody picks up, what rarely happens is the thing the business hopes for: a call back tomorrow. What happens is the obvious thing. The caller moves to the next entry in the Google listing.

That is not spite, it is reflex. When you search for a local service, the first three results all look equally good. Whoever answers first gets the job.

An answering machine does not soften this, it sharpens it: it confirms to the caller that nobody is here.

Why there is no study here#

Numbers circulate. Thirty percent of calls to trade businesses go unanswered, sixty-two percent at small companies, eighty-five percent of callers never try again. I tried to trace them.

They appear in dozens of posts by vendors selling what I sell. Not one names a survey you can look up. Where a source appears at all it is an American analysis from the 2000s whose original data nobody can find any more. The figures cite each other in a circle until they look like knowledge.

So there is none here. We will use yours instead.

The arithmetic#

Take three numbers you already know:

• How many calls come in on a normal day? Your phone bill or the call log on your mobile will tell you.
• How many go unanswered? Everything in the log without a conversation attached.
• What is an average job worth? Not the biggest, not the smallest. The middle one.

Here is an example close to what I see in small businesses: twelve calls a day, four of them unanswered because somebody is working.

Answered8

Missed4

Zahlen als Tabelle

Bezeichnung	Wert
Answered	8
Missed	4

Of those four, perhaps one would have been a real job. Across 220 working days that is 220 lost enquiries a year.

Even if only one in five would have turned into work, and a job is worth 400 pounds on average, you end the year 17,600 short. Not as a cost you can see. As revenue that never happened, and therefore never appears in any report.

Why the problem is hard to see#

Missed calls leave no trace. An unpaid invoice you see. Material that got more expensive you see. A customer who ended up somewhere else because nobody answered at 10:40 appears nowhere. They do not complain, they do not cancel anything, they simply never call again.

That is why this rarely reaches the top of anyone's list. It feels like an annoyance rather than a line item.

What actually helps#

There are three routes, and two of them are poor.

Hire someone. It works, costs several times more, and only makes sense once there is enough other work to justify it. For a three-person business, half an office role dedicated to the phone is a hard sell.

Book an answering service. Somebody sits there who does not know your business. They take a name and a number and send an email. Better than nothing, but the caller can tell immediately that they have not reached you.

An assistant that knows your business. It knows what you do, roughly what it costs and when you are around. It can put an appointment straight into your calendar instead of promising a call back. And it is there at eleven at night just as it is on a Saturday morning, which is when a good share of enquiries appear.

Where I stand#

I build these assistants, so my opinion is not neutral. Here is the honest version: if you get two calls a day and answer both, you do not need this. It starts to pay from the point where the phone rings while you are working and you cannot answer without stopping the thing that earns you money.

Run the numbers with your own figures once. If it comes to less than a few thousand, leave it. If it comes to more, you know what we would be talking about.