The real cost of a missed call

You are with a customer, or mid task, or both hands full with something you cannot put down. The phone rings. By the time you get to it, it has stopped. You will ring them back shortly, and you genuinely mean it.

Here is the uncomfortable bit. By the time you call back, a lot of those people have already booked someone else. Not because they did not like you. Because they had a problem now, your competitor's number was next in the list, and someone answered.

What the call actually cost

We are not going to throw a made up number at you, because the real one depends on your line of work and your average sale. But you can work out your own figure in about two minutes, and it is worth doing once properly.

• Roughly how many calls do you miss in a week. Check your phone's call log instead of guessing, because the log is always worse than the guess.
• Of the people who do get through, how many turn into paying customers.
• What is your average sale worth.
• Multiply those three, then multiply by fifty two.

That last number is the one that makes people sit down. And it is conservative, because it ignores the repeat work and the referrals that customer would have brought later.

If you would rather have it done for you, the speed-to-lead calculator in our free toolkit does the maths.

You already paid for that call

This is what separates a missed call from an ordinary bad day. If that caller found you through Google, or through an ad, or through a review someone left you, you spent money and effort getting the phone to ring. The marketing worked perfectly. The lead arrived and then fell out of the bucket.

Which means fixing your follow-up is nearly always cheaper than buying more leads. Spending more on ads to replace calls you are already missing is like filling a bath with the plug out.

Why speed matters more than anything else

Someone with a burst pipe, a toothache or a party to cater on Saturday is not running a procurement process. They are ringing down a list and stopping at the first business that picks up or replies. Being the first response is worth more than being the cheapest option, and it is worth far more than being the best in town and getting back to them on Thursday.

The same applies to anything you have to price up. A price sent the same day lands while the customer still cares. One sent four days later arrives after they have booked someone else. How to follow up a quote that got no reply has short text templates for chasing the ones that go quiet.

What to do about it

You cannot answer every call. Nobody running a business can. The fix is not trying harder, it is making sure a missed call starts something automatically instead of just ending.

• An instant text back when you cannot answer, saying who you are, that you are with a customer, and asking what they need. It buys you an hour or two and keeps the conversation open.
• A voicemail greeting that tells people they will get a text and when you will call. Silence makes them dial the next number.
• A reminder on the prices and proposals you have sent, so nothing sits unanswered for a week by accident.
• One place where leads from the phone, your website and your ads all land, so nothing goes missing between an inbox and a notepad.
• A simple check once a week on what came in and what you never replied to.

None of that requires you to hire a receptionist or keep your phone on the bench. Our missed-call text-back setup runs the missed-call text and the follow-up automatically, so you can get on with the work.

The part people underestimate

Answering fast does not only win you the job. It sets the tone for everything after it. A customer who gets a reply in two minutes expects a business that turns up on time, and tends to say so afterwards.

Being easy to reach is the cheapest reputation you can buy. Reviews are the new word of mouth covers how to turn those happy customers into the reviews that bring the next ones in.