Who wrote this: Vantage Growth Partners, an agency that sells an instant lead response and missed-call text-back system. The datasets are my own and they measure Google listing information, not missed calls or lost bookings. The methodology section at the bottom says exactly what they do and do not measure. The cost arithmetic uses your numbers, not invented industry averages.
About the sample: the trade businesses I measured are in one West London corridor, 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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Missed call cost calculator: how much are missed calls costing you?
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. Leave out repeat calls about the same enquiry, calls that were not sales enquiries and bookings you recovered later.
missed calls per week × share who would have booked × average job value × 52 = what going to voicemail could cost you a year.
Estimated weekly revenue at risk£600
Estimated annual revenue at risk£31,200
A purely illustrative example, swap in your own figures: a heating engineer averaging £300 a job misses 5 calls a week. If 2 of the 5 would have booked and nobody gets back to them, that is £600 a week left on the table, roughly £31,000 a year. Halve every assumption and it is still a number worth fixing. The annual figure assumes the same pattern every week and it is revenue, not profit. The point is not my example. Run yours.
And the cost is not only the lost job. A caller who gets your voicemail may book a competitor instead and leave them the review and the referral. The listing data below shows how much review cover the average trade business has, though it cannot show whether missed calls affected those totals.