What a missed call actually costs

The four numbers you need

The calculation is simple and the honesty is the hard part. You need how many calls go unanswered, how many of those would have become customers, what a customer is worth, and how long they stay.

Most people get the first number wrong. Your phone system will tell you, and the figure is usually higher than the guess. If you have no call data at all, ring your own business at half past six on a Tuesday and again on Sunday afternoon and see what happens.

• Missed calls per week, from your call logs rather than memory
• Conversion rate, and a third is a reasonable conservative starting point
• Average value of one won customer
• Lifetime value, if they come back, which changes the answer enormously

Why a third, and not more

Not every caller is a customer. Some are suppliers, some are cold sales, some already rang and got through, some were never going to buy. Assuming every missed call was a lost job produces a number so large that nobody believes it, including you.

A third is defensible, conservative and hard to argue with, which makes it more persuasive than an optimistic figure. If the number still looks alarming at a third, it is real.

Lifetime value is where the figure gets serious

A dental patient is not worth one check up. A gym member is not worth one month. A tenant referral to a letting agent is not worth one tenancy. If your business has any repeat element at all, the first transaction badly understates what a missed call cost you.

A hair salon losing one colour client a week is not losing £80. It is losing somebody who would have come back eight times a year for several years, plus whoever they would have recommended.

Worked example

A plumbing company misses 38 calls a week, which is typical for a firm where everybody is on the tools. A third of those, roughly 13, would have become jobs. The average job is £260.

That is £3,380 a week, or a little over £14,600 a month, on first jobs alone and before any repeat work. The same arithmetic for a roofer, where jobs average closer to £1,800, produces numbers that owners usually refuse to believe until they check their call logs.

The costs that are not revenue

Advertising spend is the obvious one. If you are paying for clicks and a share of the resulting calls ring out, your effective cost per acquisition is higher than your dashboard says, because the dashboard counts the click and not the silence.

Reputation is the quieter cost. People talk about businesses that never answer, and they leave reviews about it. A one star review that says nobody ever picks up the phone does damage long after the specific call is forgotten.