How much does a missed call cost a plumbing company?
By the Margin Media team · Updated
A missed call costs a plumbing company whatever the job would have paid, times the chance that caller would have booked. There is no honest single figure, because a dripping tap and a repipe are different jobs. Work it out from your own call log: missed calls a week, times your booking rate, times your typical job value.
How do you work it out?
Use three numbers you already have. First, missed calls from new numbers in an ordinary week, from your phone carrier's log. Second, of the new callers you do speak to, how many book. Third, what a typical job brings in. Multiply them. That is a week. Multiply by the weeks you work and you have the yearly cost of the phone.
- Missed calls from new numbers in one week.
- The share of answered new callers who book a job.
- The value of a typical job, by your own invoices.
- The weeks in a year you are open for work.
Why is the real cost higher than one job?
Because a plumbing customer is rarely one job. The person who called about a blocked drain owns a water heater that will fail one day, and has neighbours. When that first call goes to another plumber, so does the later work and the review that would have brought the next caller. You also paid for the call if it came from an ad.
Which missed calls matter most?
The ones from new customers with an urgent problem. A regular will leave a message or text you. A stranger with water coming through a ceiling will not. So count missed calls by time of day as well. Calls lost at lunch, just after five and on Saturday morning tend to be exactly that kind of caller.
How does Margin measure this for a plumbing company?
On the free audit, Margin does this sum with you on your own numbers. If Mia is set up, every call she takes is in your portal with its transcript, so answered calls, booked jobs and the ones passed to your team can be counted instead of guessed.
Mia is new, so there are no results to quote and none are claimed here. The sum above is yours to run whether or not you ever speak to Margin.
What Margin sets up for this.
- Mia, the AI receptionist, on every call
- Missed calls texted back within a minute
- Your portal: every call, text and booking
What a business needs is decided on its audit. It is a one-time setup fee and a monthly fee, with exact numbers on the audit.
How Margin works for plumbersSee the portal with a sample business
Related questions
How do I find out how many calls my plumbing business misses?
Ask your phone carrier or check your phone system for the incoming call log. It shows every call and whether it was answered. For a plumbing business, one normal week of that log is enough to see the pattern by hour.
Do missed callers call a plumber back later?
Regular customers often do. New callers with an urgent plumbing problem usually try the next company instead, because the leak will not wait. That is why the missed calls worth counting are the ones from numbers you have never seen before.
Is one missed call a day a real problem for a plumber?
Run the sum before deciding. One missed new caller a day, at your own booking rate and job value, adds up across a year of working days. For some plumbing companies it is small. For others it is a van's worth of work.