What a missed call actually costs a Greater Vancouver trades shop

Two facts about the phone

The hours. A week has 168 hours. Even a shop with someone at the desk all day covers about 40 of them, and that person is also ringing up customers, ordering parts and stepping out for lunch. Evenings, weekends and the second line ringing while the first is busy are all unstaffed. That isn't a staffing failure; it's arithmetic.

The answer rate. In 2016, 411 Locals rang 85 small businesses across 58 industries for 30 days and logged what happened. 62 per cent of the calls were never answered by a person: they went to voicemail or to nothing. The study is American and a decade old, and no one has published a better one for Canadian trades, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement of your shop. The order of magnitude is the point.

The math

You need three numbers, and a rough guess at each is fine to start.

The booking rate is the number people argue about. It isn't the share of callers who would ever buy; it's the share who would have booked if someone had answered. A person calling a furnace company at 9 p.m. with no heat isn't shopping for fun. For emergency and repair calls, half is conservative. For "how much do you charge" calls it's lower, which is exactly why the answer should be an inspection appointment rather than a price.

What the formula leaves out

• The second job. A customer who books once tends to come back. The missed call cost you the relationship, not the ticket.
• The review. A booked emergency call at 9 p.m. is the kind that turns into a five-star review. A missed one is sometimes a one-star review for a shop that never spoke to them.
• The call you missed while on another call. Phone logs show these as "missed" too. Most shops never look.
• The callback that goes nowhere. Time spent chasing a voicemail from someone who has already booked elsewhere is a cost with no revenue on the other side.

How to get your own number

1. For one week, pull the missed-call count from your phone's log every evening. Most business lines and every mobile show it. Include the after-hours calls.
2. Count the voicemails left. The gap between step one and step two is the callers who gave up.
3. Pick your average job value from the last twenty invoices, not your best month.
4. Put the three numbers into the calculator on the home page. It uses the formula above and nothing else.

What closing the gap costs

An answering service that takes a message recovers some of it: the caller was heard, and some will wait for the callback. A receptionist that books recovers most of it, because the caller hangs up with an appointment and stops searching. At the numbers above, one booked $250 job a month covers the After Hours plan, and two cover Book. The cost guide has the per-vendor prices if you want to compare.