What a missed call costs a plumber, in numbers you can check

Every trade business knows the phone rings while everybody is under a sink or on a roof. What is less obvious is how much of the week's work leaves through that gap. The figures below come from call data, not from a survey of how people feel about their phones.

How many calls go unanswered

Invoca, a call tracking company, reports that 27% of calls to home services businesses are not answered. The figure comes from its home services call conversion benchmarks, drawn from more than 60 million tracked calls. The same article notes that fewer than 3% of callers who reach voicemail leave a message. So a call that rings out is, for practical purposes, a call that never happened.

How many answered calls become jobs

Answering is only the first half. ServiceTitan looked at call handling across more than 3,000 trade businesses in the United States and Canada and found a typical shop booked 42% of its calls in June 2022. Plumbing sat at 43%, electrical at 41%, HVAC at 38%. The spread by size is wide: shops with fewer than five technicians booked 24%, shops with 25 or more booked 59%.

The time of day matters as much as the trade. In the same data, booking rates fell hard after 6pm. Small shops went from a 26% peak during the day to 9% in the evening. That is the window when the emergency calls come in and the office is dark.

What an after hours call is worth

Emergency work bills higher, and the guides agree on the shape of it. Today's Homeowner puts regular plumbing rates at $45 to $150 an hour, with evening work at time and a half, weekends at double and holidays at triple. Its typical emergency visit lands between $150 and $500, with bigger repairs running to $2,000. Angi's guide gives the same range: emergency plumbers charge 1.5 to 3 times the regular rate depending on when you call.

The week, added up

Take a two van plumbing outfit that gets 40 calls a week. At the Invoca rate, 11 of those ring out. If the business books calls at the typical 42%, that is four or five jobs a week that never made it to the calendar. At an ordinary job value of a few hundred dollars, that is a couple of thousand dollars a week walking to the next number on the list. If two of those were evening emergencies at time and a half, it is more.

You can do this with your own numbers in a few minutes. Count last week's inbound calls. Count how many rang out or hit voicemail. Multiply by your booking rate and your average ticket. The result is usually larger than people expect, and it repeats every week.

What changes it

• Answer on the first ring, at every hour. The 27% is mostly a coverage problem, not a sales problem.
• Book on the call. A message taken at 9pm and returned at 8am is competing with whoever answered at 9:01pm.
• Write the job where the crew looks. A booked job that lives on a notepad is only half booked.

This is the job Eva does. She answers, works out what is wrong and how urgent it is, checks the real schedule, and writes the job into the software the crew already opens. The numbers above are why she exists.