Find out how much revenue missed phone calls are costing your business every month. Adjust the sliders to match your business and watch the math update live.
Check your phone bill or call log if you're not sure.
Include after-hours, weekends, lunch, and busy-line calls.
Of the callers you do talk to, how many become customers?
Most callers who hit voicemail don't leave a message. Urgent services skew higher.
An AI receptionist answers every call for a flat monthly rate. Compare it against hiring in our cost calculator.
The formula is deliberately simple, and every number in it is yours:
Missed calls is your daily call volume times your unanswered rate, over a 30-day month. Most owners underestimate this number because they only think about calls missed while the office is open. The calls that hurt most are the 6pm emergency, the Saturday morning quote request, and the caller who gave up on hold.
Lost for good is the honesty knob. Not every missed call is lost revenue; some people call back. But callers with urgent problems rarely wait. They hang up on voicemail and dial the next result on Google. We default this to 60% and let you set it anywhere from 20% to 90% based on how urgent and interchangeable your service is.
Close rate keeps the estimate grounded: a missed call is only worth what an answered call would have been worth. If you close 45% of the calls you answer, we only count 45% of the recoverable missed callers as lost customers.
We built this calculator because we run AI phone systems for real businesses (trades, clinics, retail, a YMCA branch) and the "how much are missed calls costing me" conversation is where every one of those projects started. Run your numbers, then decide if the answer is more staff, an answering service, or software.
It is an estimate built on your own numbers, not a black box. You control every input: call volume, missed-call rate, close rate, and average job value. The one assumption we add is the share of missed callers who never come back, which defaults to 60%. Industry studies consistently find that most callers who hit voicemail do not leave a message, and many simply call the next business in the search results. Set that slider lower if your customers are unusually loyal.
Most small businesses miss somewhere between 20% and 40% of inbound calls once you count after-hours calls, lunch breaks, weekends, and times when staff are already on the other line or on a job site. Trades tend to sit at the high end because the owner is often the one answering, usually from a job site. If you have call tracking or phone system reports, use your real number.
For urgent, commodity-style services (a burst pipe, a dead furnace, a toothache), yes, and quickly. The caller's problem does not wait for a callback. They work down the Google results until someone answers. For relationship businesses with loyal repeat clients, more callers will retry later, which is why the calculator lets you adjust the share of callers lost for good.
Three, roughly: hire more front-desk coverage, contract a human answering service, or deploy an AI receptionist that answers every call instantly, 24/7, and books appointments on your real calendar. We compare all three, with real cost math, in our free AI receptionist savings calculator.
Partially. Missed-call text-back (an automatic SMS to any caller you did not answer) recovers a meaningful share of would-be lost callers by opening a conversation before they dial a competitor. It pairs well with an AI receptionist: the AI answers what it can, and texting covers everything else.
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We build AI receptionists that answer every call, book real appointments, and text back anyone you miss. Hear one live before you decide.