How much does a missed call cost?

Confident dollar figures circulate in this category and they trace back to vendor blog posts rather than to research.

Your own arithmetic is both easier and more defensible.

Most owners are surprised by the result, usually because they underestimate how many calls go unanswered at lunchtime.

Take your conversion rate on inquiries. Roughly is fine; most owners know it within a few points.

Take what a customer is worth over the whole relationship rather than on the first job. A repeat customer is several times the first invoice.

Multiply the two. That is the expected value of one inquiry, and therefore of one missed call.

Then count how many calls you miss a month, by hour, from your carrier's log. The hours matter as much as the total.

Multiply again and you have the monthly cost. Compare it against $49 a month and the decision is usually not close.

The basic sum treats every missed call as an inquiry, and they aren't. Say you run a tree service and your carrier log shows 60 unanswered calls last month. You sample 20 of them by looking up the numbers and calling a few back.

Eight were new inquiries. Seven were existing customers, who will nearly always try again, and five were junk. At that mix, about 24 of your 60 missed calls were new business trying to reach you.

Some of those weren't lost. Perhaps a third left a voicemail or called again later. That leaves 16 inquiries that went elsewhere. You close one estimate in four, and an average job is $1,100, so 16 inquiries come to 4 jobs and $4,400 for the month.

Spread across all 60 missed calls, that's about $73 each. That's lower than you'd get by treating every ring as a customer, and it holds up better because a real sample sits behind it.

Urgency is the biggest factor. Someone with a tree on their roof calls the next company within a minute, so an emergency trade loses nearly the full value of every missed inquiry. A dental patient of ten years just calls back after lunch, so a missed call from her costs you almost nothing beyond mild annoyance.

Advertising adds a cost the basic sum leaves out. If you pay for calls through Google Ads or a directory, each missed ad call burns the money you spent to get it. At $35 a call, ten missed ad calls a month is $350 gone before you count any lost jobs. A tracking number on your ads shows how many missed calls came from them.

Reputation is harder to price, but it's real. "They never answer the phone" shows up in reviews, and people read reviews before they ever dial.

Redo the sample once a year, because the mix shifts. A business that starts advertising or adds an emergency service will find last year's $73 is too low.

Calls forwarded to GreetKeeper get answered rather than rolling to voicemail, which most callers will not use.

Each one arrives as a transcript and a summary, so you can check what those recovered calls were worth rather than assuming.

Pricing is published at $49 for 200 answered calls, $149 for 750 and $349 for 2,000, with overage rates printed beside each tier.