How Much Is a Missed Call Costing My Business?

In short: more than most trades think, because you hardly ever find out about the ones you lose. In a Fix Radio survey of more than 220 UK tradespeople, a third said they'd lost work by not answering the phone. You can't answer every call from a roof. What you can do is make sure the customer who can't get through still has somewhere to go.

You're up a ladder. Your phone's ringing.

You can't answer from a ladder, under a sink or with a grinder in your hand. Nobody expects you to. But the customer ringing doesn't know where you are. All they know is that it rang out.

What happens in the next minute decides whether you ever hear from them again.

What other tradespeople say

Fix Radio asked more than 220 UK tradespeople about their phones (the survey). A third, 34%, said they'd lost work by not answering. Six in ten said they struggle to answer while they're on the tools. And only 22% had a landline number on their website for customers to ring instead.

And when a call does ring out, a voicemail isn't an answer. The customer still doesn't know whether you cover their area, whether it's a job you do, or when you could come out. So they ring the next name on the list.

The cost you never see

A missed call doesn't show up anywhere. There's no invoice for the job you didn't get. You might see a number on your phone at five o'clock, ring back and hear "sorry, we've got someone now." Or you might not ring back at all, because you don't recognise the number and it could be another sales call.

So here's the only question that matters: what's one job worth to you? A small repair? A few hundred pounds? A full roof, a rewire, an extension? Now think about how many calls rang out last month that you never called back.

Where did they walk to? The calls you don't know you've missed don't just evaporate. They get answered, by your competition.

It happens on your website too

The same thing happens online. Someone finds your website at nine at night, has a question, and can't get an answer until you're free. Research in the US, led by Dr James Oldroyd of MIT, found that replying to an online enquiry within five minutes made it around 21 times more likely to turn into a real conversation than waiting half an hour. By the time you see the message in the morning, they've often found someone else.

Every missed call and every unanswered enquiry, especially the ones you never knew about, is you making it difficult for a customer to give you money. Stop making your customers work hard to give you money.

What actually helps

Answering every call yourself isn't the answer. You'd never get any work done. What helps is making sure a customer who can't reach you still gets what they came for:

• A website that answers their questions. Do you cover my area? Is this a job you do? How soon could you come? They ask, they get an answer about your business, and they book.
• A text when you miss a call. If they ring and you can't pick up, they get a text straight away with a link to your website, so they can get their answers and book there and then, instead of ringing the next name.

That's what a Talking Website does. There's more on the enquiry that doesn't get answered, or you can skip the reading and talk to Ollie on our homepage. He's the same kind of agent your customers would get.

This post is part of Shop Window: AI for trades, in practice.