What it costs when the phone rings and nobody answers
The number is smaller than the scary version and larger than the comfortable one. It is worth knowing which.
The short answer
Multiply four figures you already have: calls you miss in a month, the share of those who never call back, the share of callers who would have booked, and your average job value. Every one of them is knowable from your own records within an afternoon. The result is what the phone is costing you, and it is the only version of this number worth acting on.
Three different numbers, usually collapsed into one
A missed call is a ring nobody picked up. Some of those people call back within the hour, some call the next name on the list, and some were selling something. A lost caller is one who never came back. A lost job is a lost caller who would have bought.
Vendors quote the first number because it is the largest. It is also the least useful, because a good share of it recovers itself.
The four figures, and where to find each
The second row is the one worth the effort. It is a spreadsheet afternoon and it is the figure that separates a real number from a frightening one.
What the result usually shows
Two patterns come up repeatedly. The first is that the total is dominated by a small number of high-value calls rather than by volume, which means a system that answers everything badly is worse than one that answers the important ones well.
The second is that the timing matters more than the count. Calls missed during working hours mostly recover, because the caller assumes you are busy and tries again. Calls missed at seven in the evening often do not, because by then they are working down a list. If your log shows a cluster after hours, that cluster is most of your number.
What to do with it
Compare it against the cost of covering the phone, honestly. That is not the monthly fee against the lost jobs. It is the monthly fee against the lost jobs you would actually have recovered, which is always fewer, because some of those callers were never going to buy from anyone.
If the after-hours cluster is where your number lives, call answering is the specific thing to look at, and the one-week tally covers the daytime half of the same question.
Frequently asked questions
My carrier does not show missed calls. Now what?
Most mobile carriers do in the online account rather than the paper bill. Failing that, run the tally for a fortnight by hand: a mark on a sheet each time a call goes unanswered is enough to size the problem.
Does voicemail count as answered?
Only if people leave one, and mostly they do not. Treat a voicemail that produced a call back as answered and everything else as missed.
Is it worth counting if I am a one-person business?
It is worth more, not less. A one-person business misses calls whenever it is working, which is most of the time, and has nobody to hand the recovery to.
Want the four figures filled in?
The free audit pulls them from your own records in fifteen minutes and hands you the working. No pitch, and the findings are yours regardless.
More from the blog
Read them in order, or start anywhere. Everything published is on the blog.