What is a good answer rate for a business phone?

Definitions do most of the work in this metric. Whether voicemail counts, whether very short calls count, and what window the rate is measured over.

Contact centers often target 80% answered within twenty seconds, and that assumes a queue and staff on a rota.

A small business with one phone is measuring something different, and a borrowed benchmark just gives you a number to feel bad about.

Count unanswered calls by hour for a month. Not a rate, a count, by hour.

That produces something actionable. Four missed calls every weekday between noon and one is a lunch cover problem with an obvious fix.

Then put a value on it. If one in five inquiries becomes a customer and a customer is worth $400, twenty missed calls a month is a number that argues for itself.

Compare against yourself month to month rather than against an industry figure. The trend is real and the benchmark usually is not.

Most small businesses have never done this exercise, and most are surprised by the result.

Say you run an auto glass shop and your phone system's October report says 97% of 412 inbound calls were answered. That sounds excellent, so you export the raw log to see what's behind it.

Of the 412 calls, 118 were picked up by voicemail, which the system counts as answered. Another 31 were abandoned while still ringing. That leaves 263 calls that reached a person, and 263 out of 412 is 64%. Roughly one caller in three got a machine or gave up.

Sorting by hour sharpens the picture. Between noon and 1pm, 41 calls went unanswered by a person. After 4:30pm it was 52. Those two windows hold most of the problem, and the rest of the day is fine. The 97% figure made the shop look like it had no problem at all, while the 64% figure, broken down by hour, showed exactly which two periods to fix.

Build the rate from three columns: answered by a person, sent to voicemail, and abandoned. A call that connected for under ten seconds usually belongs in none of them, since those are mostly robocalls and misdials, so set them aside.

Collapse repeat callers. Someone who redials three times in ten minutes is one frustrated person. Count her once, as missed, unless one of her attempts got through.

Once an assistant is answering, be careful not to repeat the voicemail trick in a new form. Every forwarded call will show as answered, so that figure stops telling you anything. Track a second one: of the calls the assistant took, how many ended with a booking, a complete message or a transfer that connected, and how many ended with the caller hanging up inside fifteen seconds? Early hang-ups are the new abandoned calls, and the transcripts let you count them.

Review monthly and compare with the same month a year earlier when you can. Phone traffic is seasonal for most trades, so October against September tells you less than October against last October.

Calls forwarded to GreetKeeper get answered, which removes them from the missed column rather than converting them into voicemail.

Each one arrives as a transcript and a summary, so you can see what those callers wanted rather than only that they rang.

We publish no rate figures of our own, because we have measured none and a borrowed number would tell you nothing.