What missed calls actually cost a small business
A missed call is the only kind of lost sale that generates no record at all. Nobody complains, nothing appears in a report, and the customer simply rings the next number on the list.
How do I work out what a missed call costs my business?
Multiply your average job value by the share of first-time callers who become customers, then by the number of calls you do not answer in a month. For a trades or cleaning business with a $400 average job and a one in three conversion, every three missed calls is roughly $400 of work.
The reason this feels abstract is that the loss is invisible. There is no angry email and no cancelled order. The caller rings somebody else within about ninety seconds and never thinks about you again.
How many calls does a small business actually miss?
More than the owner thinks, because the ones missed while working are the least likely to be noticed. Check your phone's own call log for unanswered inbound calls over a fortnight rather than estimating, since almost everyone underestimates.
Two patterns show up repeatedly. The first is the middle of the working day, when the people who can answer are doing the work. The second is early evening, when customers finally have time to ring and nobody is in the office.
Does voicemail solve it?
Mostly not. A large share of callers to a small business will not leave a voicemail at all, and among those who do, the message rarely contains enough detail to price or schedule the job without a second call.
Voicemail also arrives unsorted. Nine messages in one inbox with no indication of which is an existing customer with a problem and which is somebody selling you marketing is a queue, not a system.
Also asked
- Is it worth answering calls out of hours?
- For anything urgent, yes. A burst pipe or a lockout does not wait until morning, and the first business that picks up gets the job. For a business where nothing is urgent, out of hours matters far less.