Find out what happens when a customer calls you.

Calculate what a missed call costs you

Calls per week, times the share you miss, times your close rate, times average job value. A plumber getting 40 calls a week, missing 30%, closing half of answered calls at $450 a job, is losing about $2,700 a week in booked work, or $140,000 a year. Even if a third of those callers would have been price shoppers, the number is large enough to change how you staff the phone.

Don't count spam. Pull a month of call logs and strip the robocalls before you run the math.

The three windows where calls get missed

Lunch, the 4pm to 6pm after-school rush when homeowners get home and notice the problem, and weekends. Most owners answer well at 9am on a Tuesday. We call at the hard times, because that's when your competitors are missing calls too, and the business that answers wins the job by default.

Roughly 10% to 15% of home service calls come in after hours. If those always go to voicemail, you're forfeiting a tenth of your demand.

What happens when the call is answered matters as much

An answered call that doesn't end in a booked appointment is a half-miss. We score the greeting, whether the person asked what the problem was, whether they offered a time, whether they captured a name and number, and whether they quoted a price that scared the caller off. The industry calls this book rate; a good shop books 60% or more of real service calls.

Most businesses have never heard a recording of their own phone being answered. It's the fastest 10 minutes of improvement available.

The web form test

A form submission at 7pm that gets a reply at 10am the next day has usually already lost the job. Response within five minutes makes you several times more likely to win it. We submit one form through your site and time the reply, then note whether it was a human, an auto-responder, or silence.

If you're running Google Ads to that form, this is where your cost per lead doubles without anyone noticing.

Fixes, in order of cost

Free: a missed-call text-back that fires automatically ('Sorry we missed you, what's going on?'). Cheap: call forwarding to a second person during the three windows. Moderate: an answering service for $200 to $600 a month, which pays for itself at a single recovered job. Expensive and sometimes right: a dedicated office person.

Pick based on the scorecard. Don't buy an answering service to fix a lunch-hour problem.

Track it before you spend on ads

If 30% of calls go unanswered, every ad dollar is 30% less effective than the dashboard says. A tracked phone number per channel shows you the answer rate per source, and call recording shows you why leads don't book. We set this up before launching any campaign, and it's the first thing we check in a Google Ads audit.

Our article on turning untracked calls into 6,939 tracked leads shows what that looks like at scale.

What percentage of calls to small businesses go unanswered?

Published surveys range from about 27% to 62% depending on the industry and the source. Home services sit toward the high end because the people who answer the phone are usually on a job. The check measures your actual rate instead of an average.

How much does a missed call cost a contractor?

Calls missed times close rate times job value. For most trades it works out to $100 to $500 per missed call, and $25,000 to $150,000 a year for a shop missing a handful a day. The scorecard calculates it with your numbers.

Will customers call back if I don't answer?

Mostly no. Multiple studies put the share who won't call back after one unanswered attempt around 80% to 85%, and most won't leave a voicemail. They call the next business on the list.

How does the free missed-call check work?

You tell us your main number and website. Over about a week we call three times at different hours and submit one web form, posing as a homeowner with a realistic request. We don't book anything or waste your crew's time. You get a one-page scorecard.

Will my staff know they're being tested?

Not unless you tell them. We recommend you don't, then share the scorecard with them afterward. It's the most useful phone training most teams ever get.

Is a missed-call text-back worth it?

Yes, and it's the cheapest fix available. An automatic text within a minute of a missed call recovers a meaningful share of callers who would otherwise have moved on. Most phone systems and CRMs can do it for free or nearly free.

Is a 24/7 answering service worth it for a small contractor?

If you miss more than a few calls a day and your average job is over $300, almost always. A $300 to $600 monthly service pays for itself with one recovered job. If your misses cluster at lunch, call forwarding solves it for free.

How many calls should an HVAC or plumbing shop get a week?

A single-truck shop in a mid-size market typically sees 20 to 50 inbound calls a week in season; established multi-truck shops see several hundred. What matters is the share answered and booked, which is what we measure.

What's a good book rate for service calls?

60% or better of real service calls (not spam, not vendors) should end with an appointment. Below 40% almost always traces to quoting price before understanding the problem, or to not offering a specific time.

Do you sell an answering service or phone software?

No. We're a marketing agency. We run the check because a leaking phone makes every ad we'd run less effective, and because it's useful whether or not you ever hire us.