What do the calls you miss actually cost?
An unanswered call costs the same to buy as an answered one and shows up in the ad account as a conversion. This puts a yearly number on the ones that ring out, and separates the ones you win back with a callback from the ones that are gone.
Your numbers
The answer
Gross profit lost a year
$53,127
110.7 jobs that were never booked
Calls missed a month
33
22% of 150
Won back by calling
11.5
35% of the missed calls
Gone for good
21.5
Reached somebody else instead
Revenue lost a year
$132,818
110.7 jobs at $1,200.00
Advertising spent on calls that rang out
$35,640
396 calls a year at $90.00
How this was worked out
- Calls missed
- 150 × 22% = 33
- Gone for good
- 33 × (100% − 35%) = 21.5
- Jobs lost
- 21.5 × 43% = 9.2
- Revenue lost a month
- 9.2 × $1,200.00 = $11,068
- Gross profit lost a year
- $11,068 × 40% × 12 = $53,127
What each improvement in answering is worth a year
| Missed rate | Calls gone for good a month | Jobs lost a year | Gross profit lost a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22% | 21.5 | 110.7 | $53,127 |
| 15% | 14.6 | 75.5 | $36,223 |
| 10% | 9.8 | 50.3 | $24,149 |
| 5% | 4.9 | 25.2 | $12,074 |
| 0% | 0 | 0 | $0 |
Zero missed calls is a target nobody hits — trades work in roof cavities and under houses. The row is there to show the size of the whole prize, not to suggest it is available.
What to do with this
- 33 calls a month go unanswered. After callbacks, 21.5 are gone — 9.2 jobs, $11,068 of revenue and $4,427 of gross profit every month.
- Over a year that is $53,127 of gross profit. Weigh that against what answering those calls would cost — an answering service, a part-time person, or a rule that every missed call gets rung back inside five minutes.
- Separately, you spent about $2,970 a month buying the calls that rang out — $35,640 a year of advertising that produced a ringing phone and nothing else.
- Ring back inside five minutes or do not bother. The person with water on the floor has already called the next business on the list, and a callback two hours later reaches someone who has been sorted out.
Change anything above and the link in your address bar changes with it, so you can send the exact result to whoever needs to see it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in your browser.
What this does, and how the maths works
What it does
- Counts the calls that ring out, then removes the share you genuinely win back by calling them straight away.
- Converts what is left into lost jobs, lost revenue and lost gross profit, monthly and annually.
- Prices the advertising you spent buying calls that nobody answered, which is a separate loss on top of the revenue.
How to use it
- Get the missed-call count from your phone system, call tracking or handset log. Do not estimate it — this is the number people are most wrong about.
- Enter the share you call back and actually reconnect with. Reaching voicemail does not count.
- Set a booking rate, or use one of the published trade figures and read the caveat.
- Enter your average job value and gross margin, then read the annual figure.
The formula
- Missed calls = calls × missed rate
- Calls gone for good = missed calls × (1 − callback recovery rate)
- Jobs lost = calls gone for good × booking rate
- Gross profit lost = jobs lost × job value × gross margin
Reading the answer
- Compare the annual loss against what an answering service or an extra part-time person costs. In most trade businesses the loss is larger, which makes this the easiest decision on the site.
- The advertising figure is a second, separate loss. You paid for those calls at the same cost per lead as the ones that connected.
- If the missed rate is above about a quarter, no amount of extra advertising will fix the business. It will just buy more calls to miss.
What it cannot tell you
Not every missed call is a lost customer — some ring twice, some are suppliers, some are people who were always going to call three businesses. Set the callback recovery rate honestly rather than optimistically, and treat the answer as the size of the problem rather than a debt someone owes you.
Where every figure on this page came from
Every default in the calculator above is either your own number or a figure from one of the studies below, with the market and the sample stated. Nothing here is an estimate somebody felt was about right, and no United States figure is wearing an Australian label.
ServiceTitan, Data Report: Average Call Booking Rates
ServiceTitan · 2022 · measured in US & Canada · medium confidence
More than 3,000 trade businesses across the United States and Canada, June 2022.
Measures inbound CALL to booked job, not lead to job, and the fieldwork is from 2022. There is no Australian equivalent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with SoudCoh
Have more questions? Let's chat!
Book a Free Strategy CallIt costs the gross profit on the job you did not book, plus the advertising you spent to make the phone ring. On a $1,200 job at a 40% gross margin and a 43% booking rate, one permanently missed call is worth about $206 in gross profit. If the call came from advertising at $90 a lead, that is another $90 gone. Twenty permanently missed calls a month at those numbers is a little over $49,000 a year of gross profit, before counting the advertising.
Some do and some do not, which is why the callback recovery rate is an input rather than an assumption. Urgent work is the clearest case: someone with a burst pipe rings the next business while your phone is still going to voicemail. Quoted work is more forgiving — a callback within the hour often still lands. Set the recovery rate for the kind of work you do rather than taking the default.
Compare the annual gross-profit figure this tool returns against the annual cost of the service. That is the whole decision. The comparison usually favours answering, because the loss scales with your advertising spend while the cost of a service does not — the more you spend on ads, the more expensive each unanswered call becomes.
For emergency work, minutes. There is no Australian study we could find that puts a number on this for trades, and we are not going to quote the widely circulated response-time statistics because none of them trace to a dataset we could check. What is not in doubt is the mechanism: the customer's problem does not wait, so a callback competes against whoever answered in the meantime.
Only if you advertise as available then. If your ads say 24/7 and the phone goes to voicemail at 9pm, that call is missed and it was expensive — emergency searches are the dearest ones in the account. If your ad schedule matches your opening hours, an after-hours call is a bonus you never paid for.
Run these next
One number rarely settles anything on its own. These three answer the questions this one raises.
Leads to booked jobs
Walk a month of enquiries through answering, booking and completion to see the real lead-to-job rate and which stage is costing you the most work.
ServiceTitan 2022
Cost per lead calculator
Work out cost per click, conversion rate and cost per lead from three numbers, then compare against a US benchmark and our measured Australian range.
SoudCoh case studies · WordStream 2026
Job capacity planner
Compare the jobs your crew can complete in a month against the jobs your enquiries produce, and find how many more leads you can absorb before the business is full.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
We will read
your real ones.
Send us the account rather than the estimate. We will tell you what it is actually costing to win a job, which part of the chain is leaking, and whether it is worth fixing — before anyone asks you to sign anything.