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Every call that rings out while you're busy with a customer adds up to $ a year.
How much do unanswered phone calls cost my shop in a year?
To get the yearly cost of missed calls, take the calls you miss in a year, times the share of those callers who would have bought, times what one customer spends with you for as long as they stay. Most callers who get no answer never call back, so each missed call is usually a lost customer. On average, small businesses lose about $126,000 a year to missed calls.
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This is what you give away each time you let the phone ring out.
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Continue with my numbers Free · no card · 20 messages a dayHow it is calculated
- Multiply the calls you get in a week by 52 to get the calls in a year.
- Multiply the calls in a year by the share you miss. This gives the missed calls.
- Multiply the missed calls by the share of callers who would have bought. This gives the lost customers.
- Multiply what a customer spends per visit by the visits per year and by the years they stay. This gives what one customer is worth.
- Multiply the lost customers by what one customer is worth. This gives the yearly cost.
- What one missed call costs you = Share of callers who would have bought if you had answered ÷ 100 × What a customer spends on one visit or order × How many times a customer buys from you in a year × How many years a customer usually keeps coming back
- Calls you miss in a year = Phone calls you get in a normal week × 52 × Share of those calls nobody picks up ÷ 100
- Customers lost in a year = Calls you miss in a year × Share of callers who would have bought if you had answered ÷ 100
- What missed calls cost you in a year = Customers lost in a year × What a customer spends on one visit or order × How many times a customer buys from you in a year × How many years a customer usually keeps coming back
An example
Phone calls you get in a normal week: 50 calls · Share of those calls nobody picks up: 30 % · Share of callers who would have bought if you had answered: 20 % · What a customer spends on one visit or order: 100 $ · How many times a customer buys from you in a year: 4 times · How many years a customer usually keeps coming back: 2 years.
Result: What one missed call costs you: 160 $ · Calls you miss in a year: 780 calls · Customers lost in a year: 156 customers · What missed calls cost you in a year: 124,800 $.
Worth keeping in mind
- Small businesses often miss between 30% and 62% of their calls. Some trades miss even more. Check your own phone log.
- About 85% of callers who get no answer do not call back. So a missed call is rarely just a delay.
- The share of callers who buy changes a lot from trade to trade. Put in your own figure, not a guess from somewhere else.
- What one customer is worth counts sales over all the years they stay, not only this year. Part of this money would come later.
- The count leaves out other losses: money spent on ads that bring calls nobody answers, and a worse name in town.
Sources
Text drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence, from the sources listed, and checked against the worked example. It is a tool for orientation: for tax or contractual decisions, your accountant has the last word.
How this page came about
Nobody wrote it by hand. Oravio built it on its own.
- It looked for the sources and opened them one by one: the ones that do not answer never get in.
- It wrote the formulas and tried them on a worked example: if the maths does not add up, the page never goes out.
- It laid the page out and put it online all by itself, with nobody touching a key.
It is the same work it does for the people who use it: you say what you need in plain words, and it gets done while you are doing something else. A page like this one, on your own numbers, included.
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