Tool · Missed-call audit
What are missed calls
actually costing you?
Any business where a customer calls and then gets a price loses money this way. Type in four numbers and the math runs live. The defaults are cited, none of them are about your business, and all four are meant to be changed.
Every inbound call the business takes in a month, across whatever numbers ring. If you have no idea, your phone system does.
Calls that go unanswered or unresolved. The 27% default is measured across home-services businesses by Invoca. Yours will differ.
Revenue per signed job or matter, blended across new and repeat work. The $10,000 default is a placeholder sized on the national average for an asphalt re-roof because that is the number with public data behind it. Your figure is almost certainly different. Change it.
Share of inbound calls that turn into signed work. The 8% default is derived from published close-rate benchmarks, worked through in the roofing version of this analysis.
What missed calls cost you a year
$2.59M
Expected revenue lost in a year to calls nobody picked up, at the numbers above. Halve every input and it is still $1.30M.
Missed calls / year
3.2K
Per missed call
$800
Expected revenue per call (job value × conversion)
Recovery scenarios
Both rows are arithmetic on the numbers you entered, not a forecast and not a promise. Something that answers every call catches the ones that were heading to voicemail. It does not catch a wrong number, a robocall, or somebody who hangs up mid-ring.
Get the report
Want this as a report you can
put in front of your team?
We will email your numbers with a short, practical plan for recovering those calls, then a couple of follow-up notes you can act on or ignore. No pitch, no spam.
What this measures
Four assumptions, stated out loud.
The call that rang out at 6.10pm
Not the ones your team handled badly. The ones nobody heard, because the office had gone home, or because the third simultaneous ring had nowhere to land.
Expected revenue, not a guaranteed sale
Each missed call is worth your average job multiplied by the share of calls that turn into work. That is the honest way to price a call: not every one would have closed, and pretending otherwise inflates the number.
A year, because a week looks survivable
Three missed calls a day sounds like nothing. The reason this is an annual figure is that the annual figure is the one that changes what an owner does about it.
Nothing about your competitors
Where the caller went next is unknowable, so it is not in the math. The number below assumes only that the call happened and nobody answered it.
What closes it
The cheapest fix is usually not the one you expect.
Hiring is the obvious answer and it is the one that does not work, because the calls being missed are the ones outside the hours you are staffing. A second person covers the busy hour. It does not cover Saturday, and it does not cover the fourth ring at 7pm.
An answering service covers more of the clock and hands you a message, which is a record of the lead rather than a conversation with it. That is better than voicemail and it is not the same as somebody who knows your services and can offer a real time on your calendar.
What we build is the third option: a system that picks up every time, asks what your front desk would ask, offers a slot, and tells your team the moment a real one lands. You can hear it working before you believe any of this, on our own line, and it is the same system we would build you.
That number is fixable.
Let's talk.
Thirty minutes to walk through your real numbers and which of this, if any, is worth your money. If the honest answer is "not yet," you will hear that on the call.
How the math works
annual loss = (monthly calls × miss rate × 12) × (job value × conversion rate)
The defaults come from publicly cited data about home-services businesses, which is where numbers like these are actually published: Invoca for missed-call rates, HomeGuide and This Old House for job values, and Allied Emergency Services for close rates. None of them measure a law firm, a med spa, or a lender, which is the reason every field above is editable and the reason we say so rather than dressing a placeholder up as research. The full derivation is in the roofing version of this analysis.