The maths of a missed call

There is a whole genre of marketing built on scary statistics about missed calls. We are not going to quote any of them, partly because most are unverifiable, and mostly because you do not need them. Your own numbers are scarier, and they have the advantage of being true.

The three numbers you already know

First: how many calls ring out in a normal week. Not a guess at the worst week, a normal one. If you have never counted, count this week. Most owners who count for the first time are surprised, because the misses happen precisely when you are too busy to notice them.

Second: what a new customer is worth. Not the first transaction, the relationship. A gym membership is not one week's fees, it is however long an average member stays. A clinic client is a course of appointments. Use a conservative figure you would defend to your accountant.

Third: your close rate. Of the people who get through and have a real conversation, how many become customers? Again, be conservative. The point of this exercise fails if the inputs are optimistic.

The multiplication

Missed calls per week, times 52, times customer value, times close rate. That is the whole formula. As a worked example, and it is only an example, not a claim about your business: five missed calls a week, a $500 customer, a 30 percent close rate comes to $39,000 a year. Change any input and the output moves with it, which is exactly why you should run it with your own figures rather than trusting anyone's example, including ours.

There is a calculator on our front desk page that does this arithmetic in your browser. It sends nothing anywhere. It exists because the multiplication lands differently when the inputs are yours.

The honest caveats

Not every missed call is a new customer. Some are wrong numbers, some are suppliers, some would never have signed up. That is what the close rate input is for, and it is why we say to set it conservatively. If you want to be harsher, halve the missed call count on the theory that half of the missed callers ring back. The number that comes out is still, for most service businesses, not small.

And one thing the formula cannot capture: the caller who does not ring back does not tell you. There is no complaint, no bad review, no signal. The revenue just quietly arrives at whichever competitor picked up. The maths is the only way to see it at all.