How many enquiries does a UK trade business lose to missed calls?

Ask a roofer, a plumber or an electrician how many calls they miss in a week and you will usually get a shrug and a guess. Ask their phone provider and you will get a number, and it is nearly always higher than the guess.

Rather than quote a survey statistic that may or may not apply to your business, this article gives you a way to work out your own figure in ten minutes, and then decide whether it is worth fixing.

Step one: count the calls you did not answer

Most business phone systems and mobile providers show missed calls. Look at the last four weeks and count them. Include calls that went to voicemail, whether or not the caller left a message. If you use personal mobiles for business, do it for each one.

If you cannot get the data, a reasonable working assumption for a small trade business with everyone out on jobs is that somewhere between a quarter and a half of inbound calls during working hours go unanswered. Emergency trades in winter are often at the higher end.

Step two: work out how many were real enquiries

Not every missed call is a customer. Some are suppliers, some are sales calls, some are existing customers with a question. Look at the numbers you do recognise and take them out. What is left, the unknown numbers, is your pool of potential enquiries. In our experience with service businesses, well over half of unknown-number calls during working hours are new enquiries.

Step three: decide how many you would have won

You will not win every enquiry you answer. Use your normal conversion rate: if you quote ten jobs and win four, that is 40 percent. If you do not know it, a third is a sensible starting point for most trades.

Step four: put a value on it

Multiply by your average job value. For a heating engineer that might be a few hundred pounds for a repair, or several thousand for an installation. For a roofer it could be anything from a repair to a full re-roof. Use a conservative average.

A worked example

A two-van plumbing and heating firm misses 30 calls a month. About 18 are from unknown numbers. Say 12 of those were genuine enquiries. At a one-in-three win rate that is 4 jobs. At an average of £350 per job, that is £1,400 a month of work that went to whoever answered next.

That figure is almost certainly an underestimate, because it ignores the lifetime value of a customer who would have come back for annual services and recommended you to neighbours.

Why the callers do not just leave a message

Because they do not need to. When someone has a leak, a broken boiler or a tile off the roof, they are working down a list. The first business that answers and sounds competent gets the job. Voicemail feels like a dead end, so most people hang up and dial the next number.

What you can do about it

• Divert to someone who can answer. An office, a partner, a family member. This works until they are busy too.
• Use a call answering service. Better than voicemail. The message usually arrives by email, and the person answering does not know your business.
• Use an AI receptionist. It answers every time, asks the questions you would ask, captures the details, and puts them in your CRM. The caller gets a text saying what happens next. You get a summary rather than a missed call.

Whichever you choose, the first step is the same: find out your number. Once you know that four jobs a month are walking out of the door, the decision usually makes itself.

If you would like to see how an AI receptionist would handle your calls, book a demo and we will ring it together.