Guide

What a missed call costs a small business

A simple way to put a dollar figure on the calls your business misses, using your own numbers and no made-up industry statistics.

You will find pages claiming that some precise percentage of callers never call back. We do not know where those figures come from and neither do the pages, so this guide uses your numbers instead. You need four, and you have all of them.

The four numbers

Calls missed in a month. Your phone shows them. Count last month's missed calls and voicemails.
The share that were new customers. For most trades and clinics it is the people you did not recognise. Guess low.
What a new customer is worth. Not one job: the first job plus the repeat work a typical customer brings. A hairdresser and a furnace installer get very different numbers here.
The share who called someone else instead. Be honest: when you got no answer from a plumber, did you leave a voicemail or dial the next one?

The sum

Missed calls × share new × value of a customer × share who went elsewhere = what last month's missed calls cost. Do it twice, once with cautious guesses and once with likely ones, and the truth is between them. The missed-call calculator on this site does the arithmetic and lets you change one number at a time.

The two things that change the sum

Answering the call. Every call that is answered and booked moves out of the sum entirely. That is what an AI receptionist on your existing number is for: the calls you miss are forwarded and answered, and the booking is made on the spot.
A text after a missed call. A caller who gets a text within a minute saying you saw the call is far less likely to be already talking to your competitor. Delusia sends one automatically, worded like this:

Hi! You just called Cedar Lane Dental. We're sorry we missed you — someone from our team will get back to you shortly. Reply STOP to opt out.

The text goes only to someone who has just called you, which is a notification about their own call, not marketing, and it carries the STOP line because every text should.

Questions people ask

Why not just use voicemail?

Voicemail answers nothing and books nothing, and a caller who has to leave a message is a caller who can still ring the next name. The sum above is the cost of that.

Does the calculator send my numbers anywhere?

No. It runs in your browser; nothing you type is uploaded.

Try it on your own number

Fourteen days free. Keep your number, forward the calls nobody answers, and read the transcripts.

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More guides: How much does an answering service cost in Canada? · AI receptionist or answering service? · What should a missed-call text say? · Is an AI receptionist worth it for a very small business? · How does an AI receptionist put a caller through to a person?