The arithmetic
Work out what your missed calls are worth before anyone sells you anything.
Two numbers you already have, multiplied. No industry statistics, no survey nobody can find, nothing you have to take on trust.
Move the two sliders
Calls you miss in a week, and what an average job is worth to you. Everything else is multiplication.
walking out the door every week
That's $21,600 a month. $259,200 a year.
$5,400 walking out the door every week. That's $21,600 a month. $259,200 a year.
Getting the first number without guessing
Nearly every owner guesses low on this, because the calls you remember missing are the ones somebody told you about. The ones that cost you money are the ones you never heard about at all.
On an iPhone
Phone app, then Recents, then Missed at the top. Count the incoming calls from one full week — Monday to Sunday — and ignore anything you recognise as a supplier or a family member.
On Android
Phone app, then Recents or History, and filter to missed. Same one-week window, same rule about the numbers you recognise.
On a business line
Your carrier's online portal has a call detail record. Ask for unanswered inbound calls for a month; it is usually a download, and it is the most honest version of this number.
Then check the box
Count the voicemails left in that same week. The difference between the missed calls and the messages is the group of people who rang, got a beep, and left no trace.
That last gap is the whole thing. Those people rang your business, got a beep, and went somewhere else — and because they left no message, they have never appeared in any report you have ever looked at.
The arithmetic, so you can check it
Missed calls in a week, multiplied by what an average job is worth, gives the weekly figure. Weekly times four is the month. Monthly times twelve is the year.
Four weeks to a month rather than the calendar-accurate 4.33, because every figure on this page has to survive being checked in your head. It understates the year by four weeks, and understating is the right direction to be wrong in on a page asking you to trust a number.
Four ways this number is still too low
- It ignores anyone who rang twice, gave up, and got counted once.
- It ignores the caller who reached you, heard a hold, and hung up before it registered as a call at all.
- It uses four weeks to a month and twelve months to a year, which is four weeks short of an actual year.
- It counts a job once, and ignores the fact that a customer you win in August may be a customer you keep for six years.
What to do with the number
Weigh it against whatever fixing it costs. If the yearly figure is small, the honest answer is to do nothing and spend your attention somewhere it matters more. Plenty of businesses are in that position and nobody should talk them out of it.
If it is large, the question becomes which of the missed calls you can actually recover. The cheapest fix is answering the phone. The next cheapest is making sure something answers when you can't — a text back inside thirty seconds reaches the caller while they are still holding the phone, which is the only window that exists.
We do the second one. How it works is the long version, and the voicemail comparison is the short one.
Questions on the arithmetic
What counts as an average job value?
What you actually invoice on a typical job, not your best month and not a full system replacement. If your work splits into a cheap call-out and an expensive install, run the arithmetic twice rather than averaging the two into a number that describes neither.
Isn't some of this double-counting, since they'd call back?
Some of them do call back, and the number above is a ceiling rather than a forecast. That is exactly why it is worth counting your own missed calls instead of trusting a statistic — you can see how many of those numbers eventually turned into a job, because you have the records.
Why not just quote an industry statistic?
Because the widely repeated ones trace back to nothing you can check, and a number you cannot source is a number you should not make a decision on. Your own call log is a primary source and it is sitting in your pocket.
15 minutes. Bring your call log.
We'll count what you actually missed last month and tell you what it cost. If it's not worth fixing, we'll say so.
Or go break the demo first. It costs you nothing to test.