Work out what missed calls cost you
Five numbers and you have the figure. Nothing is gated, and we do not ask for your email to show you the answer.
Your numbers
Inbound calls to your main number, in a normal week.
Unanswered, after hours, or gone to voicemail. Most owners guess low here.
Of the calls you do answer. An estimate is fine.
Your close rate once you are in front of them.
What one new client pays you on the first job. First sale only.
Worked example
A business taking 80 calls a week and missing a quarter of them. Enter your own numbers above to replace it.
about $190,000
revenue lost to missed calls every year
This treats a missed call as a lost call. Some people ring back, so read it as the ceiling, not the invoice.
- calls missed a year
- 1,040
- clients never won
- 104
How this is calculated
- Calls missed a year = calls per week x share missed x 52
- Meetings lost = calls missed a year x call-to-meeting rate
- Clients lost = meetings lost x meeting-to-client rate
- Revenue lost = clients lost x average deal value
- 52 weeks, not 48. The phone rings while you are closed, and that is most of the point.
- Every rate here is your estimate, not an industry benchmark. Move them and watch the figure move.
- The headline is rounded to two significant figures. Four stacked estimates do not support more precision than that.
- First-sale value only. Repeat work and referrals from those clients are not counted, so the true cost is higher.
Want to walk through your numbers?
Twenty minutes, no pitch. Bring the figure above and we will tell you which part of it is actually recoverable.
Questions people ask about this
- How many calls does a business normally miss?
- It varies more than most owners expect. Clinics and trades commonly land between 20 and 40 percent once after-hours calls, calls during jobs, and calls that arrive while the line is already busy are all counted. Rather than trusting an average, pull your own phone records for a fortnight.
- Does a voicemail count as a missed call?
- Here, yes. A voicemail is only worth something if someone reliably returns it the same day. If that is genuinely happening at your business, lower the miss rate to reflect it.
- Why is the number so large?
- Because it is annual and it stacks four estimates on top of each other. Halve any one of the rates and the figure halves too. That sensitivity is the useful part of the exercise, not the headline itself.
- What is a realistic miss rate to aim for?
- Around 5 percent. Round-the-clock answering does not get anyone to zero, and any tool promising zero is selling you something.