Who wrote this: Vantage Growth Partners, an agency that sells an instant lead response and missed-call text-back system. The dataset is my own; the methodology section at the bottom says exactly what it does and does not measure. The cost arithmetic uses your numbers, not invented industry averages.
About the sample: the businesses I measured are West London trades, because that is the dataset I built. The arithmetic in the calculator below is not about trades at all. It works for any business that sells an appointment, so a clinic, a salon, a fit-out firm or a maker can run their own numbers through it unchanged.
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How much are missed calls costing your business?
You will find plenty of pages quoting an "average cost of a missed call". Ignore them; the honest version is three numbers you already have. First, your average job value. Second, how many calls went unanswered on your phone log last week, most tradespeople who actually check are surprised, because the misses happen exactly when you are working. Third, how many of those callers would realistically have booked, remembering that someone ringing a roofer during a leak is not browsing.
missed calls per week × share who would have booked × average job value × 52 = what going to voicemail costs you a year.
Estimated weekly cost£600
Estimated annual cost£31,200
A purely illustrative example, swap in your own figures: a heating engineer averaging £300 a job who misses 5 calls a week, where even 2 of the 5 would have booked, is leaving £600 a week on the table, roughly £31,000 a year. Halve every assumption and it is still a number worth fixing. The point is not my example. Run yours.
And the cost is not only the lost job. The same caller who got your voicemail books your competitor, leaves them the Google review, and refers them the neighbour. Which is where the data comes in, because the average trade business has far less review cover to absorb that loss than it thinks.