What do missed calls and slow replies cost you?
Enter how many calls and web leads you get, how many calls get answered, and how fast someone replies. The calculator shows the jobs and revenue you lose each month to the ones that slip through, and what you get back by fixing it.
The assumptions, yours to edit
About 31% of the revenue you could be booking is leaking out of intake.
$132,665 a month never becomes a job because calls ring out or web leads wait. Fixing intake comes before buying more leads: every extra dollar of ad spend leaks at the same rate until the phone gets answered and replies go out in minutes.
52 of 173.3 monthly calls ring out; 15% try again, so 44.2 callers are gone. At your close rate that is 13.3 jobs and $86,190 a month.
At a 1-hour reply you reach about 45% of leads, against 100% inside 5 minutes. That is 23.8 of 43.3 leads unreached, 7.2 jobs, $46,475 a month.
- Answer 90% of calls live$57,460
- Reply to web leads within 5 minutes$46,475
- Both fixes together$103,935
Recovery is measured against your own targets in the assumptions panel, not against perfection.
Closing the $103,935 a month above is mostly routing and reply speed: a page that puts the phone first, a form that reaches a human in minutes, and text-back on every missed call. We build that with every paid media engagement, and a discovery call is where we look at yours.
How much does a missed call cost a service business?
One missed call costs the close rate times the job value, minus the few callers who try again. A plumber closing 30% of calls on $600 jobs loses about $150 per unanswered ring after callbacks; an HVAC contractor closing 30% of $6,500 replacements loses closer to $1,650. Multiply by the calls that ring out each month and the number is usually the largest line item nobody tracks. This calculator does that multiplication with your figures.
What percentage of calls to small businesses go unanswered?
The figure most people quote, 62%, comes from a 2016 study by 411 Locals that monitored 85 businesses for thirty days: 37.8% of calls were answered live, 37.8% went to voicemail, and 24.3% got no response at all. Numa's 2021 phone report put the miss rate for small businesses at about 22%. The truth for your business is in your phone system's call log, which is why the tool asks for your own answer rate and only uses the studies as a starting point.
Why does responding to a lead within 5 minutes matter so much?
Because the odds collapse after that. The MIT Sloan and InsideSales.com Lead Response Management study found the odds of contacting a web lead drop 100 times between a 5-minute and a 30-minute response, and the odds of qualifying it drop 21 times. Harvard Business Review's 2011 audit of 2,241 companies found firms that responded within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as those that waited one more hour, and only 37% managed it. The lead is still comparing options in those first minutes; an hour later they have talked to someone else.
Do missed calls matter more than slow web replies?
Usually, in home services and legal. A caller has already decided to talk to a human and, per Numa's report, 85% of callers who hit voicemail do not try again. A web lead has more patience, but the response-time research says not much: half of the reach is gone within 30 minutes. The tool prices both leaks separately so you can see which fix pays first.
What fixes missed calls and slow replies without hiring more staff?
Three things, in order of cost: route calls to a second phone before voicemail, send an automatic text back on every missed call with a booking link, and put web leads into a channel a human sees in minutes rather than an inbox checked twice a day. Answering services and intake software help when volume justifies them. On the marketing side, the page the click lands on should put the phone number first and keep the form to three fields, which is the part we build.
How the math works.
Calls. Missed calls per month equal weekly calls times 4.33 times the share not answered live. The callers who try again are removed using the callback rate (default 15%, from Numa’s finding that 85% do not). What remains is multiplied by your close rate and job value. Calls are priced at the same close rate as any other lead, not higher, even though analyst estimates put phone conversion well above web forms; that keeps the result conservative.
Web leads. The share of leads you can still reach is read from a curve of response time, anchored to the MIT/InsideSales odds ratios (5 versus 30 minutes: 100x for contact, 21x for qualification) and the HBR 2011 audit (within an hour: about seven times the qualification odds of an hour later, sixty times a day later). Odds ratios are not shares, so the curve is our translation of that evidence into a reachable percentage: 100% inside five minutes, 60% at thirty, 45% at an hour, 15% at a day. It is labeled a judgment and it is editable.
Recovery. Each scenario re-runs the model at your target answer rate and reply time and reports the difference. Ad-spend waste is counted only when you enter a cost per lead, and only for the leads that were lost.
What it does not do. It does not assume you can answer every call or reply to every lead in five minutes, it does not apply vendor recovery claims, and it does not know your seasonality. Run it with a slow month and a busy month.
- Lead Response Management Study (Oldroyd, MIT Sloan with InsideSales.com), 2007. Six companies, 15,000+ web leads, 100,000+ call attempts. Odds of contacting a lead called within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100x; odds of qualifying drop 21x. Source ↗
- Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Audit of 2,241 US companies: 37% responded within an hour, 16% within 1 to 24 hours, 24% took longer than a day, 23% never responded; average response 42 hours. Responding within an hour made a firm nearly 7x as likely to qualify the lead as waiting one more hour, and over 60x versus waiting a day. Source ↗
- Valve+Meter, The State of Speed to Lead in Home Services. Nearly 500 home-services companies were sent a web lead: 95% did not respond within 5 minutes, 71% not within an hour, 55% not within a day. Source ↗
- 411 Locals, SMBs Don't Answer 62% of Phone Calls, January 2016. Thirty-day monitoring of 85 businesses in 58 industries: 37.8% of calls answered live, 37.8% to voicemail, 24.3% no response. Small sample and dated; used as a floor, not a fact about your business. Source ↗
- Numa, Small Business Phone Report, 2021. Small businesses miss about 22% of inbound calls; 85% of callers who reach voicemail or no answer do not try again. Source ↗
- BIA/Kelsey, as reported by Invoca: inbound phone calls convert to revenue 10 to 15 times more often than web leads (2016 data). Analyst estimate reported by a call-tracking vendor; the tool does not apply it as a multiplier, it explains why calls are priced at the same close rate as leads rather than lower. Source ↗
Related: the lead cost calculator sets the ceiling on what a lead can cost, and the landing page grader checks whether the page your leads land on puts the phone first.