Work it out for your business
Set the sliders to your own reality. The defaults are deliberately modest, and the result deliberately conservative — the aim is a figure you'd be comfortable defending to your accountant, not a scary one.
Your missed-call ledger
Use your own numbers. If you're guessing, guess low — the point is a floor, not a scary headline.
The number
£21,840
of work a year walking to whoever picks up next.
- Calls unanswered a year
- 312
- Of those, jobs never won
- 87
- Realistically recoverable
- £15,288
"Recoverable" assumes 70% of those callers can be caught by ringing more than one phone and getting voicemail as email the same hour — not 100%. Nothing recovers every call.
The four numbers that drive it
- Call volume. Everything scales from this, so use a normal fortnight rather than your quietest or busiest.
- Unanswered share. Almost everyone guesses low here. Check your actual call log before you decide — it's usually a surprise.
- Close rate. A missed call is only worth money if answering it would have won work. A business that converts one enquiry in ten loses far less per missed call than one converting half.
- Call-back rate. The variable nobody models. Existing customers ring back; new enquiries mostly don't. If most of your calls are from people who've never used you, set this low.
Why the honest number is usually smaller than the headline — and still large
You'll see claims that UK small businesses lose tens of thousands a year to missed calls. Those figures assume every unanswered call was a live job at full value. They weren't. Strip out the wrong numbers, the sales calls, the people who ring back anyway and the ones you'd never have won, and the figure typically drops by more than half.
It also usually stays in the thousands. For a trade business taking 30 calls a week, missing one in five, at a £250 average job, the arithmetic lands well above the annual cost of a phone system — which is the only comparison that matters.
How to run the audit properly
- Pick two ordinary weeks. Not a holiday, not your peak.
- Log every incoming call: answered, missed, and whether the caller was new or existing.
- For missed calls, note whether they rang back within 48 hours.
- Take your close rate from your own quotes-to-jobs ratio, not a guess.
- Come back and put the real figures in above.
Then compare it against what fixing it costs. If the recoverable figure is smaller than a phone plan, don't buy one — genuinely. If it's several times bigger, you have a business case rather than a sales pitch.
What actually moves the number
- More than one phone ringing. The single biggest lever. One handset means one chance.
- Voicemail as email, immediately. Same-hour callbacks convert; next-day ones mostly don't.
- An out-of-hours message that says something useful — your hours and a way to book — instead of ringing out.
- Knowing when you miss them. Missed-call reporting by hour tells you whether the problem is staffing or the phone system.
Common questions
On a mobile, count the received-but-unanswered entries in your call log over two normal weeks and double it for a monthly view. On a business line, your provider's call reporting will show unanswered calls by hour. If you have neither, count the callers who say 'I tried you yesterday' for a fortnight — it's a rough floor, but it's a real one.
Related reading
If the number looks worth fixing, see how a trade setup is normally built or our pricing.