What is a missed call?

Your phone keeps a log of them, and for most small businesses the number is higher than the owner expects.

The ones with a voicemail are recoverable. You know who rang and roughly why, and you can call back.

The ones with no message are the expensive category. A number with no context, and no way to know whether it was a job or a wrong number.

Say an electrician checks his phone log for last week and counts 23 missed calls. Nine left voicemails, and he called those back. Of the other 14, five were numbers already in his contacts, who'll try again. That leaves nine calls from unknown numbers with no message.

He can't know what those nine wanted, so he estimates. Looking at the calls he did answer from unknown numbers, about one in three was a real job inquiry, and his average job is $380. One in three of nine is three jobs, or around $1,140 for the week. He won't have won all three, and some callers may have tried again later. Even halved, it's more than $2,000 a month that never appeared on any report. Your own figures will be different, but the arithmetic takes ten minutes, and it turns "I probably miss a few" into a number you can weigh against the cost of fixing it.

Your handset's missed-call list is an undercount, because it only shows calls that reached the phone and rang. Two other kinds of lost call never show up there.

A caller who got a busy signal was turned away by the carrier before your phone knew anything about it. On a single line with no call waiting, every call that arrives while you're talking disappears this way. Only your carrier's records show them, and you may have to ask for a report.

An abandoned call is one where the caller hung up early, after two rings or partway through a greeting. Some systems log these as missed, some as answered, and some not at all. They matter, since a run of callers bailing out at ten seconds usually means your greeting is too long or your ring time is.

So when you size up the problem, ask your provider for all three counts, and treat the number on your handset as the floor.

GreetKeeper answers rather than logging. A call that would have rung out becomes a transcript with a name, a number and a reason attached.

Busy-or-no-answer forwarding is the usual first step, because it changes nothing about how you work and catches what you would otherwise lose.

We do not claim you will never miss a call. Forwarding depends on your carrier, your line and your own rules, and any absolute promise there would be a claim we cannot keep.