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The missed-call calculator
An HVAC company that takes 250 calls a month and misses one in five is not missing fifty calls. It is missing the jobs those fifty calls would have become, and at a typical ticket that is real money leaving the business through the phone every month. This calculator works out how much, from four figures you already have, and shows the arithmetic so you can check it rather than believe it.
Every call that reaches your business. Check your phone bill or your call log for a typical month.
Missed, voicemail, engaged and after-hours. Most owners guess low here, so check before you accept your own estimate.
Across everything you invoice. A diagnostic call and a system replacement both count.
Of the callers you do speak to, how many become paid work.
Revenue exposed to unanswered calls
$11,250
a month
- Calls you never spoke to
- 50
- a month
- Jobs those calls would have become
- 25
- a month, at your close rate
- Over a year
- $135,000
- at the same rate
We will look at your actual numbers with you. No charge, no obligation.
How this is worked out
- Calls you never spoke to = inbound calls × the percentage you do not answer.
- Jobs those calls would have become = those calls × the percentage of enquiries you win.
- Revenue exposed = those jobs × your average job value.
- The annual figure is the monthly one multiplied by twelve.
This is an estimate built entirely from the four figures you entered. It is not a guarantee of revenue, and it is not a claim about what we would recover. Some of those callers would never have booked, some call back, and some are the same person twice. Treat it as the size of the problem worth investigating, not as money on the table.
Getting the inputs right
Where each of these four numbers actually lives
The output is only as good as what goes in, and three of the four inputs are routinely guessed when they could be looked up in twenty minutes.
- Inbound calls a month
- Export the call log from your phone system for a recent month. Pick a busy one and a quiet one and run the calculation twice. The gap between them is the seasonal exposure a rota cannot cover.
- The percentage you do not answer
- In the same export, count everything that did not reach a person: missed, abandoned, voicemail, engaged, and anything that rang out. Owners consistently guess this low, and the difference between the guess and the log is usually the most surprising number on the page.
- Average job value
- Total invoiced revenue for the month divided by the number of jobs. Include diagnostics and include replacements; the mix is the point, because the calls you miss out of hours skew toward the expensive end.
- The percentage of enquiries you win
- Of the callers you spoke to, how many became invoiced work. If your field service software tracks this, use its figure rather than your own.
The honest caveat
Every reason this number is too high
We build AI receptionists, so we have an obvious interest in this figure looking large. That is exactly why it is worth stating what it overcounts: repeat attempts from the same caller, people who ring back the next morning and book anyway, suppliers and wrong numbers in the call log, and callers who were price-shopping and would never have bought. Against that, it also undercounts in one important way, because the calls missed outside opening hours are more urgent and more valuable than your average. Treat it as an order of magnitude worth investigating, not a figure to put in a business plan.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
- How do I find out how many calls I actually miss?
- Your phone system already knows. On a VoIP service the call log exports to a spreadsheet with a status against every call, and the ones you want are missed, abandoned, sent to voicemail and rung out. On a mobile it is the call history. On a traditional landline with a carrier bill, ask the carrier for a call detail record. The measurement that matters most is the one nobody runs: filter it to outside your opening hours and count what is left, because that is the number an after-hours service is priced against.
- Is the estimate this gives me the amount I would recover?
- No, and treat any vendor who says otherwise as a warning. The figure is the revenue exposed to unanswered calls, which is the size of the problem rather than the size of the prize. Some of those callers ring back. Some are the same person trying three times, which your call log counts as three. Some were never going to book, and some were suppliers, wrong numbers and your own technicians. What the number is good for is deciding whether the problem is worth an afternoon of your attention.
- What close rate should I use if I do not track one?
- Use the proportion of the calls you do answer that turn into invoiced work, and work it out from one recent month rather than from memory. Owners routinely put this too high, because the calls that are remembered are the ones that booked. If you genuinely have no way to check, the honest thing is to run the calculation twice at the two ends of what you think is plausible and look at the range rather than at a single figure.
- Does an unanswered call really lose the job?
- Often, though not always, and it depends heavily on urgency. Somebody booking a maintenance visit in April will leave a message and wait. Somebody with no heat at two in the morning is working down a list of numbers and stops at the first one that answers. That is why the after-hours slice of your call log is worth separating out: the calls you miss out of hours are disproportionately the urgent, high-value ones, so applying an average close rate to them probably understates rather than overstates the loss.
- Would an answering service fix this more cheaply?
- Sometimes. A human answering service costs less to start and is better at the calls that need judgement, and worse at consistency, out-of-hours coverage and capturing equipment detail. The comparison worth making is not price against price but cost against the exposure you have just calculated, for each of voicemail, an on-call rota, a human service and an AI receptionist. Our guide comparing human and AI answering services sets out where each one genuinely wins.