What do missed calls actually cost?

Three numbers give you the answer. How many calls you miss in a week. What a new customer is worth to you over their lifetime — not on the first sale. And what share of those callers would have become customers.

Multiply them out over a year and the figure is usually uncomfortable. A business missing 25 calls a week, with a customer lifetime value of $1,200 and a 25% conversion rate, is losing roughly $390,000 a year in opportunity. Run your own numbers on the calculator on our home page.

Most people calculate this using the value of the first sale, which badly understates it. A dental patient is not worth one cleaning. A plumbing customer is not worth one call-out. If you retain customers at all, the first transaction is a fraction of what that relationship is worth.

Research on inbound lead response found that contacting a new lead within five minutes rather than thirty makes them dramatically more likely to qualify, and the odds keep collapsing the longer you wait. (Lead Response Management study; Harvard Business Review, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads.”)

This is why voicemail performs so badly. It is not that people dislike leaving messages — it is that by the time you return the call, they have already spoken to someone else.

After-hours calls are worth disproportionately more, because the caller has fewer alternatives open and higher urgency. A burst pipe at 9pm goes to whoever answers. So does a toothache on a Sunday.

These are also the calls a business is least likely to answer, which is exactly why they are where the return on answering is highest.