How to work out how many calls your business actually misses

Almost every business we speak to underestimates its missed call rate, and the ones who guess correctly are usually guessing about the average rather than the peak. The peak is what matters, because that is when the money is.

Pull thirty days, not seven

Seven days flatters you or damns you depending on which week you pick. Thirty days smooths out the school holidays, the bank holiday and the week somebody was off sick. Every VoIP system exports this. If you are on a traditional line, your provider can give you a call detail record on request.

Count four things

• Total inbound calls
• Answered calls, meaning a human picked up, not the IVR
• Abandoned calls, meaning they hung up before anybody answered
• Calls outside opening hours, which most systems log separately

Your miss rate is abandoned plus out-of-hours, divided by total. In UK SMEs that number is usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty-five percent. If yours comes out under ten, check whether the IVR is answering and counting that as answered.

Now put money on it

Take your missed number, multiply by the share that would have converted, and multiply that by the average first-year value of a customer. Most businesses know the last two figures better than they think, and an approximation is fine at this stage.

A single-site practice with 126 calls a week, a 27% miss rate, a 22% conversion rate and a £1,240 first-year value is losing about £9,275 a week. Even if you halve every assumption, it is still a number worth acting on.

Then find the window

Plot the misses by hour of day and day of week. It is almost never evenly spread. In most accounts we see, more than half the misses land in two identifiable windows, usually lunch and the ninety minutes after close. That is useful, because it means you do not need to solve the whole day to recover most of the money.

What to do with the number

Whatever you do next, keep the baseline. Whether you hire, change your rota or automate the answering, the only way to know it worked is to run the same export in ninety days and compare.