What a missed call costs a small business (and how to find out)

We don't have a statistic for you

You'll have seen figures for what missed calls cost small businesses. Big round ones, usually in a headline, usually from a company selling the cure. We're not going to quote any of them. Even the careful ones are averages across businesses nothing like yours, and a florist and a roofer don't lose the same thing when the phone rings out.

What a missed call costs you is a sum with three inputs: how many calls you miss, how many of those would have turned into work, and what that work is worth. You can find all three in a week with a notepad. The answer might be alarming. It might be "not much", in which case you've saved yourself a subscription.

Week one: count

For seven days, count every call you didn't answer. Your mobile's call log shows them, usually in red. A desk phone or phone system has a missed-calls list. Go through it each evening, while you still remember the day.

Then clean the count. Cross off spam, sales calls and numbers that rang for two seconds. Cross off people already in your contacts who simply tried again and got you. What's left is the number that matters: real callers who wanted something and didn't reach anyone.

Note the hour of each one as well. You'll probably find they cluster, around lunch, or school pickup, or the two hours you're always on site.

How many would have become work?

Your close rate is the share of new inquiries that turn into paid jobs. Look at the last twenty inquiries you did answer and count how many you won. If it's six, your close rate is six in twenty, or three in ten.

Be honest about two things. Some missed callers ring back or leave a message, and you win them anyway. Return your missed calls for a week and see how many pick up and still need you. And some were never going to be customers. So shade the figure down. If you win three in ten of the calls you answer, assume something lower for the ones you missed and returned late.

What is a job worth?

Take your last twenty invoices, add them up, divide by twenty. That's your average job. If a couple of huge ones skew it, leave them out and use the typical one.

If customers come back (a salon regular, a lawn cut every two weeks, a landlord with six properties) the first job undersells it. You don't need a formula. Note roughly how many times a typical customer buys from you in a year, and keep that figure beside the sum.

Do the sum

Real missed calls per week, times the share you'd have won, times the average job. Say you run a two-van plumbing outfit. You counted ten real missed calls in the week. You reckon you'd have won two in ten. Your average job is $300. That's two jobs, $600 a week, and somewhere around $2,400 a month walking past the door.

Those figures are invented to show the arithmetic. Yours might be a tenth of that or three times it. A café missing calls about opening hours loses very little per call. A roofer who misses one call after a storm might lose a whole re-roof.

Whatever you get, that's your budget ceiling. A fix that costs a fraction of the monthly figure and recovers a fair part of it is worth trying. A fix that costs more than the figure isn't, however good the demo.

The fixes, cheapest first

Start at the top. Don't skip to the paid options until the free ones have had a fair two weeks.

• Call back faster (free). Set two fixed times a day for returning missed calls, say 12:30 and 4:30. A caller who hears from you inside a couple of hours often hasn't hired anyone else yet.
• Fix your voicemail greeting (free). Say your name and when you'll call back, and ask for the address and the problem. Then do what the greeting said.
• Text back from your own phone (free). "Sorry I missed you, on a job, will ring at 4." Ten seconds, and the caller knows they were heard.
• Share the phone (cheap). Forward calls to a partner or the office during the hours where your count showed the worst gaps.
• A human answering service (monthly cost). A person takes the message. Compare quotes using how much an answering service costs.
• An AI line (monthly cost). It answers the calls you miss, holds a conversation, and sends you the details in writing.

Where an AI line fits

We make one, so treat this as an interested party's view. It suits a business whose missed calls cluster in hours when nobody can answer, and whose callers want a conversation and not a beep. You forward only the calls you miss, using a short code from your carrier, so your own phone still rings first. The steps are in forward missed calls to an assistant.

On a CosVoice line the caller is asked who they are and what they need, and you get a written summary after every call, marked as missed on your mobile. It says it's an AI if asked, and it never gives out a card number or agrees to a charge. Plans start from $29 a month and the rest is on the pricing page. Hold that against your own sum, not ours.

Count again in a month

Whatever you change, repeat the week of counting four weeks later. Same notepad, same rules. Did the number of real missed calls drop? Did the callbacks turn into jobs?

If the fix was free and it worked, stop there. If it was paid, you now have a before and an after, which is more than most people have when the renewal email arrives.

Common questions

More on answering calls

• How much does an answering service cost?
• After-hours answering: what small businesses actually need
• What to look for in a call answering service
• Live answering vs automated answering: an honest comparison