How to work out what missed calls are costing you

Every business that answers the phone for a living has a number it does not know: what the unanswered calls are worth. It is worth knowing before anyone — us included — tries to sell you something to fix it.

This takes about five minutes and uses only your own figures. No industry averages, because industry averages are useless to you. A dental practice in Bristol and a plumber in Leeds have nothing in common except that both of them lose work when the phone rings out.

Step one: count them

Most phone systems will tell you. Look for "missed calls", "unanswered", or a call log you can filter. If you are on mobiles, the recent calls list on each handset is enough.

Count one full month. Not a week — a week is too small a sample and you will happen to pick a quiet one. If you can only face a week, count a week and multiply by four, but know that you have made the number less reliable.

You want two figures:

• how many calls went unanswered
• how many of those numbers you have never seen before

That second figure matters. A missed call from an existing customer is an annoyance. A missed call from a number you do not recognise is somebody who was ready to buy something.

Step two: halve it

Take the unknown-number figure and cut it in half.

This is deliberately pessimistic. Some of those people rang back. Some were selling you photocopier toner. Some dialled the wrong number. Halving is not a formula — it is a way of making sure the number you end up with is one you would be willing to defend to your accountant.

If you would rather be more careful still, take a third.

Step three: multiply

Now multiply by what a customer is actually worth to you. Not the price of one job — the price of the whole relationship, if people come back.

For a hypothetical example, and these are made-up numbers to show the shape of the sum rather than a claim about any real business:

• 60 missed calls in a month
• 40 of them from unknown numbers
• halved, that is 20 genuine enquiries
• if 1 in 4 of those would have booked, that is 5 jobs
• at an average job value of 200 pounds, that is 1,000 pounds

A month. Every month. And it compounds, because the customer you never spoke to is also the repeat booking you never got and the recommendation they never made.

Run it with your own numbers. It might be a lot smaller than that. It might be considerably larger.

What the number does not tell you

It does not tell you those calls were winnable. Some people ring three businesses and go with whoever picks up first, and if you were second you were never getting that job regardless.

It also does not tell you the calls were worth answering. If half your inbound is price-shoppers for work you do not want, catching more of them is not obviously progress.

What it does tell you is the size of the problem. That is the only thing you need before deciding whether to spend money on it.

What to do with it

If the number is small, do nothing. Genuinely. Not every leak is worth plugging, and a business that answers 80 percent of its calls and is comfortable is not broken.

If it is large, you have four honest options:

1. Answer more of them yourself. Free, and it works, right up until it stops scaling and you resent the phone.
2. Hire someone. A part-time receptionist in the UK runs somewhere in the region of 12,000 to 16,000 pounds a year. If your number is 1,000 pounds a month, that maths works.
3. A human answering service. Cheaper than an employee, usually charged per call or per minute. They will take a message. Most of them cannot see your calendar, so they cannot book anything.
4. An AI receptionist. Answers every call, knows your prices and your availability, and books straight into your diary. Cheaper than a person, available at 3am on a Sunday.

We build the fourth one, so treat our enthusiasm for it accordingly. It is not the right answer for everyone — if your work needs judgement on the first call, or your enquiries are complicated and emotional, a person is better and we will tell you so.

The test we would apply

Take the monthly figure you calculated. If it is smaller than what a fix would cost per month, do not buy the fix. That is the whole test.

We apply it in reverse when people ring us: if the arithmetic does not clear our own fee, we say so on the call rather than after the invoice.