What should a home service business do about missed calls?
A missed call is often a customer who then calls the next company, so every missed call should get a reply within minutes, even if only a text. A homeowner with a problem usually has a list of names from a search, and when the first one does not pick up they try the second. A short reply that says who you are and when you will call back gives them a reason to stop dialing.
Why does a missed call cost more than it seems to?
Most owners think of a missed call as a small thing, because the caller can always leave a message or try again. Some callers do. Many of them are standing in a flooded basement or a driveway with a garage door stuck halfway open, and they are not going to wait to find out whether you check your voicemail at lunch.
Getting that phone to ring also cost you something. Your truck lettering, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and the neighbor who mentioned your name all did their work, and the phone rang. When nobody answers, all of that effort goes to whichever company picked up next. A plumbing company or a garage door company feels this the most, because their callers need help today and have no reason to be patient.
Why do home service businesses miss so many calls?
The phone rings when the owner is under a sink or driving between jobs with a crew in the truck. In a small company the person who does the work is often the same person who answers the phone, and nobody can do both at once.
Calls also come in when nobody is working. Evenings and weekends are when many homeowners finally have a minute to deal with the repair they have been putting off, and a call at eight on a Sunday night is as real as one at ten on a Tuesday morning. In most small companies the phone is one more job that nobody owns during the busiest hours of the day.
What are the options for answering calls you cannot pick up?
There are a few ways to handle it, and most businesses end up using more than one. A text reply that goes out when a call is missed lets the caller know a real company saw the call and will get back to them. A clear voicemail greeting helps too, as long as it tells the caller when to expect a call back and someone actually keeps that promise. Some owners pay someone to answer the phone, either a person in the office or an answering service, so a human voice picks up during the hours the crew is busy.
Each option has a limit. A text reply only helps if someone follows through on it. A voicemail box that nobody checks until evening is the same as no answer at all. An answering service can take a message, but the message still has to reach the person who can book the job. Whichever one you choose, the call is only handled when a person from your company has talked to the customer.
What happens to a missed call after the first reply?
This is where many businesses lose the job a second time. The owner sees three missed calls at the end of the day, returns one, and the other two get pushed to tomorrow. By tomorrow one of those callers has booked someone else and the other has forgotten they called.
A missed call is an inquiry like any other, and it belongs on the same list as the web forms and texts, with a name on it and a note of whether anyone has called back. When missed calls live only in the call log of one person's phone, nobody else in the business can see them, and nobody can tell which ones are still waiting. That is the reason to keep track of every lead in one place.
What a fix looks like
When the owner is under a sink at two in the afternoon and the phone rings out, an alert shows the missed call, and whoever on the crew is free first sends a short text and calls back within the hour. The record shows who made that call, so the customer does not hear from two people asking the same questions. At eight the next morning the office opens a list of anyone from the day before who still has not talked to a person, and those calls go out before the first truck leaves. The Sunday night caller gets a call on Monday morning, and the owner can look back over a busy week and see that every caller was reached.
The Home Service Guild Marketing Operations System puts each missed call in the same list as your other inquiries with the spam filtered out, and it sends the alert and the morning list.
Questions owners also ask
Should I call back a missed call that did not leave a voicemail?
Yes, call it back. Many homeowners hang up rather than leave a message, especially when they have other numbers to try. The caller who did not leave a voicemail is often still looking for help when you ring them.
How do I know how many calls my business is missing?
Your phone carrier or phone app usually keeps a log of missed calls, and looking at a busy week of it is often a surprise. The harder question is how many of those callers ever heard back, and that is only easy to answer when missed calls land in the same list as your other inquiries.
Do I need to answer calls around the clock?
Not every business does. What matters is that a caller outside your hours knows their call was seen and when they will hear from you, and that someone keeps that promise the next morning. A company that does emergency work may decide it needs a person on the phone after hours, and that is a choice worth making on purpose.
What if many of my missed calls are spam?
Robocalls and sales pitches make a call log harder to read and tempt owners to ignore numbers they do not recognize. Filtering that noise out keeps the real callers from getting lost in it, which is the subject of how to stop spam and junk leads.
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