The Real Cost of a Missed Call

85% of callers who can’t reach a business won’t leave a voicemail.

They just hang up and call the next company on Google. Your phone rang, you missed it, and that revenue went to a competitor.

Most contractors know they miss some calls. They don’t know what those calls actually cost.

Breaking down the numbers

Take a plumbing company with an average ticket of $800. Standard stuff - water heater repairs, drain clearing, fixture replacements.

When that phone rings and nobody answers, here’s what walks out the door:

The immediate job: $800. The follow-up service they might need in 6 months: $400. The water heater replacement they’ll need in 2 years: $2,400. The referral they would have given to their neighbor: $800.

One missed call. $4,400 in lifetime value, minimum.

Now multiply that by the 20-30% of calls that go unanswered during business hours in the average trade business.

Why calls get missed

Contractors are on job sites. Hands are dirty. The work requires focus. Answering every call isn’t realistic when you’re in a crawlspace or on a roof.

The problem is what happens to those calls.

62% of small businesses don’t answer calls during normal business hours. Some are solo operators with no help. Some have staff who are also busy. Some figure voicemail will catch it.

Voicemail doesn’t catch it. 85% of those callers never leave a message. They’re not interested in waiting for a callback. They have a problem now.

The homeowner with water in their basement isn’t leaving a voicemail and hoping someone calls back in an hour. They’re calling the next plumber on the list until someone picks up.

Different call values by trade

HVAC contractors see higher per-call values than most trades. The average service call is $350-500, but the replacement opportunity is $8,000-15,000.

That missed call about a “weird smell from the furnace” could have been a $12,000 equipment sale. Instead, it’s a competitor’s $12,000 equipment sale.

Plumbers average $350-800 per service call with similar replacement opportunities on water heaters, repipes, and sewer lines.

Roofers have the highest single-job value. Miss the call about “a few shingles that blew off” and you miss the $18,000 reroof that inspection would have uncovered.

Electricians run $200-500 for service calls, with panel upgrade opportunities in the $2,000-4,000 range.

The per-call value varies, but the math always hurts.

The weekend problem

Emergency calls happen when they happen. Pipes don’t wait until Monday to burst. AC units don’t fail at convenient times.

The highest-value calls come at the worst times - nights, weekends, holidays. These are the calls with the most urgency, the highest willingness to pay, and the lowest patience for voicemail.

A contractor who shuts off the phones at 5pm is handing their best leads to whoever answers on Sunday morning.

Some of the most profitable home service businesses built their reputation on availability. “We answer when others don’t” is a real competitive advantage in markets where most contractors treat nights and weekends as off-limits.

What answering services actually cost

A basic answering service runs $150-300 per month. They pick up, gather information, and patch through emergencies or take messages.

At $250 per month, that’s $3,000 per year.

If that service catches 10 calls per month that would have been missed, and your average job is $600, that’s $6,000 in revenue from calls you would have lost.

The service pays for itself twice over. And that’s using conservative numbers and ignoring lifetime value.

Some contractors balk at paying someone else to answer their phone. The math says they’re leaving money on the table.

Internal solutions vs outsourcing

Larger operations can staff for coverage. A dedicated CSR who only answers phones costs $35,000-45,000 annually with benefits. That works if call volume justifies a full-time person.

For smaller operations, a live answering service makes more sense. You pay per call or per minute rather than carrying payroll for slow periods.

Hybrid approaches work too. Staff answers during business hours, answering service picks up overflow and after-hours. The caller always reaches a human, regardless of when they call.

The specific solution matters less than the outcome: every call gets answered by a person.

The voicemail delusion

“But I call them back within 20 minutes.”

By then, most of them have already booked someone else. The 78% stat - customers go with whoever responds first - applies to callbacks too.

The homeowner who left a voicemail at 10:15am and got a callback at 10:35am has already spoken to two other contractors. One of them picked up on the first ring and scheduled an estimate for that afternoon.

Your callback isn’t competing against the voicemail sitting in your phone. It’s competing against the contractor who answered when the homeowner was actively looking.

Read more about speed to lead and why the first 5 minutes matter.

Tracking what you’re missing

Call tracking software shows you exactly how many calls come in and what happens to them. Numbers like:

• Total inbound calls
• Answered vs. missed
• Time of day distribution
• Call source (which marketing is driving calls)
• Outcome (booked, quoted, lost)

Most contractors have no idea what their actual answer rate is. They assume they’re catching most calls because they feel busy. The data usually tells a different story.

If you’re running Google Ads or LSA, you’re paying for every call that rings. Paying for calls you don’t answer is worse than not advertising at all.

Doing the annual math

Say you miss 5 calls per week. Pretty conservative for a busy contractor.

That’s 260 missed calls per year. At an 85% no-voicemail rate, 221 of those callers moved on without giving you a second chance.

If half of those were legitimate service opportunities with an average ticket of $600, you’re looking at $66,300 in direct revenue that went to competitors.

Add in lifetime value - the follow-up work, the replacements, the referrals - and a single year of missed calls can cost you $200,000 or more in long-term revenue.

For $3,000 per year in answering service fees.

The marketing connection

Contractors who invest in marketing and neglect phone coverage are burning money twice.

You pay to get the phone to ring. Then you pay again by not answering it.

The fix isn’t more marketing. The fix is catching the demand you’re already generating. Every dollar spent driving traffic to a phone that goes unanswered is a dollar wasted.

If your answer rate is below 90% during business hours, that’s the first thing to fix - not your ad copy, not your landing page, not your targeting.

What good looks like

The contractors who take this seriously have answer rates above 95%. Every call gets picked up by a person within 3 rings. After-hours calls get answered live, not by voicemail.

They know their cost per call. They know their booking rate. They track which calls convert and which don’t.

When they add marketing spend, they know it’s going into a system that actually captures demand. The phone rings, someone answers, jobs get booked.

That sounds basic. For most contractors, it would be a transformation.

Read more about follow-up automation and building systems that capture demand.