Work out your own number, because the published ones are made up

Search this category and you will find confident statistics about lost revenue, the share of callers who never call back and the annual cost of an unanswered phone. We went looking for primary sources behind the ones that circulate most and did not find them. Several trace back to other vendors' blog posts citing each other.

That does not make the underlying idea wrong. Missing calls plainly costs money. It makes the specific numbers useless for a decision, because you cannot tell whether they describe a dental practice or a plumbing company, and those two have almost nothing in common on this question.

We are not going to add ours to the pile. We have no customers, so any figure we published would be worse than the ones we are complaining about.

A missed call from an existing customer is usually a delay rather than a loss. They know you, they will call back or leave a message, and the relationship absorbs the friction. A missed call from a stranger who found you in a search result is different: they have four other numbers on the screen and no reason to prefer yours.

That asymmetry is the whole analysis. A business whose inbound is 80 percent existing customers has a much smaller problem than one where 80 percent are new inquiries, even with identical call volumes and identical miss rates.

So the first thing to work out is not how many calls you miss. It is what share of your inbound is people who have never dealt with you.

Take your phone records for a month and count unanswered inbound calls. Most carrier and VoIP systems will give you this. Then estimate what share were new inquiries rather than existing customers, suppliers or spam, which you can sample by listening to a day of voicemails.

Multiply that by the rate at which you convert a new inquiry into work. You know this number better than any vendor does. Then multiply by the average value of a job. That product is your monthly cost of missed calls, and it is specific to you.

Now compare it against the plans. If the figure is $180 and a plan is $49, the decision is easy. If the figure is $60, it is genuinely marginal and you should think about whether a better voicemail greeting closes most of the gap. We would rather you did that sum than took our word for it.