Missed Calls Are Missed Revenue—And You're Missing More Than You Think

"It's going to be negative 10 degrees in Nashville this weekend. People's pipes are going to burst."

Chuck Hill was walking me through the reality of emergency service calls. When disaster strikes, customers aren't patient. They're not leaving thoughtful voicemails and waiting for callbacks.

They're calling the first number they find. If you don't answer, they call the next one. Then the next one. By the time you call back, the job is booked—with someone else.

The 85% Problem

Research from multiple sources, including ServiceTitan's analysis of service business phone data, shows that roughly 85% of callers who reach voicemail will not leave a message.

Think about that. For every 100 calls that go to voicemail, 85 people simply hang up and call someone else.

They're not mad at you. They're not writing you off forever. They just have a problem right now, and they need someone who can solve it right now. Your voicemail can't do that.

The 15% who do leave messages? Many of them are also calling other companies while they wait. Whoever calls back first often wins—regardless of who the customer originally preferred.

The Google Review Problem

Tom Marcy described his prospecting method: looking up service businesses and reading their Google reviews.

"They might be a nice guy, right? But they're not calling to talk to a nice guy. They're calling to get a problem solved."

The reviews tell the story. Scroll through enough of them and you'll see:

• "Called multiple times, no answer"
• "Left a message, never heard back"
• "Had to call another company because they didn't respond"

These aren't reviews about bad work. They're reviews about never getting the chance to do work at all. The customer literally wanted to pay this company money and couldn't get through to them.

A 4.8-star company with 200 reviews can still be bleeding leads through unanswered phones. The reviews only capture the customers who eventually connected. They don't capture the ones who gave up before that.

The Emergency Multiplier

Not all missed calls are equal. A missed call during normal business hours from someone comparison shopping is one thing. A missed call from someone with water flooding their kitchen is another.

Emergency calls have characteristics that make them both valuable and time-sensitive:

• High urgency: The customer will not wait. They physically cannot wait. The problem is actively getting worse.
• High value: Emergency work commands premium pricing. A burst pipe at 2 AM isn't getting quotes from three companies.
• High conversion: An emergency caller isn't shopping. They're buying. Whoever answers gets the job.
• High referral potential: Great emergency service creates stories. "Our pipe burst and these guys were there in an hour" gets told at dinner parties.

Missing these calls doesn't just cost you one job. It costs you the most valuable type of job, with the highest margins, the fastest close, and the best word-of-mouth potential.

The Math Nobody Does

Let's make this concrete. Say you're an HVAC company. You get 50 inbound calls per week. You miss 20% of them because you're on jobs, it's after hours, or you're just busy.

That's 10 missed calls per week. At 85% not leaving voicemail, that's 8-9 leads just gone. Not lost to competitors on price or quality—just lost because they couldn't reach you.

If your average job value is $500 and your close rate on answered calls is 40%, those 8-9 missed leads represent roughly $1,600-$1,800 in lost revenue. Every week.

Over a year, that's $80,000-$90,000 in revenue you never had a chance to compete for.

And that's assuming a modest 20% miss rate. Many service businesses—especially one-person or small operations—miss 30-40% of calls. The math gets painful fast.

The "We're Fine" Delusion

Tom identified the biggest challenge in helping service businesses with this: "90% of the people say 'oh we're fine answering the phones.' Some miss, you know, slip through the cracks."

The problem is, you can't see what you're missing.

You know about the calls you answered. You know about the voicemails you got. You don't know about the calls that went unanswered and never came back.

It's survivorship bias. You only see the customers who got through. You never see the customers who couldn't—because they're now someone else's customers.

The only way to know your real miss rate is to track it. Call tracking software, phone system analytics, or even just reviewing your call logs against your booked jobs. Most businesses that do this exercise are shocked by the gap.

What "Available" Actually Looks Like

You don't have to personally answer every call. That's not realistic for anyone working in the field.

But something needs to answer. Something that can:

• Confirm you're the right company for their problem
• Capture the essential details
• Give them confidence that help is coming
• Get them scheduled if possible

That can be:

• A dedicated office person (expensive for small operations)
• An answering service (variable quality)
• An AI receptionist (what Chuck and Tom built)
• A smart IVR that actually works (rare but possible)

The specific solution matters less than the outcome: when someone calls with a problem, they don't hit a dead end.

The Callback Trap

"But I always call back within an hour or two."

Great. But in that hour or two:

• The emergency customer already booked someone else
• The comparison shopper talked to three other companies
• The referred lead went with whoever their friend's backup recommendation was

Callbacks work for certain types of inquiries. They don't work for time-sensitive problems. And you often can't tell which type of call you're missing until it's too late.

The plumber who thinks they're "pretty good" about returning calls isn't seeing the 85% who didn't leave a message in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Every unanswered call is a customer who wanted to give you money and couldn't. Some of those customers will try again. Most won't.

The fix isn't complicated:

1. Track your actual call metrics, not just your perception
2. Acknowledge that you're missing more than you think
3. Implement something—anything—that ensures every call gets a response
4. Measure the before and after

You can't improve what you can't see. And what most service businesses can't see is the revenue walking out the door every time their phone rings unanswered.

The customer with the burst pipe isn't calling to talk to you. They're calling to get their pipe fixed. If you're not available to help them, they'll find someone who is.

Make sure that someone is you.