We Sorted 2,715 Calls to 11 Florida Businesses. Who Answers Matters Most.

Our first missed-calls study counted every call to one Florida contractor. This time we went wider. We pulled five and a half months of call tracking from 11 Florida businesses and sorted 2,715 calls. The call answer rate ran from 33% at one business to 97% at another, and one thing explained most of the gap: who picks up the phone.

The call answer rate ran from 33% to 97%

We could tell what happened on 2,368 of the calls. 1,735 of them, 73%, reached a person. The other 633 rang out, went to voicemail, hit a mailbox that wasn’t set up or ended in a phone menu.

That average hides a wide spread. The best business answered 97% of its calls. The lowest answered 33%. Six of the 11 answered fewer than 3 calls in 4.

The gap is about who picks up

Six of the businesses send calls to a front desk, office staff or a call center. Together they answered 84% of their calls, and the lowest of the six still answered 65%.

The other five send calls to the owner or to one person’s phone. Together they answered 43%. Four of the five answered fewer than half.

Those owners aren’t ignoring the phone. They’re on a job, with a customer or driving between sites when it rings. One person can’t do the work and answer every call at the same time.

What good looks like

The best call answer rate belonged to a logistics company with a staffed front desk. On weekdays between 8 and 5 it missed 2 of 349 calls. Ten of the 12 calls it missed all period came in at night or on a weekend.

A Central Florida HVAC company with an office did almost as well during the day. It answered 80 of 84 weekday calls between 8 and 5, or 95%. After hours it missed 16 of 44.

Neither one does anything clever. Someone whose job is the phone is there when the calls come in. When nobody is there, calls get missed.

Phone menus and voicemail lose callers too

A phone menu doesn’t count as an answer. At another Central Florida HVAC company, 93 callers hung up in the menu before reaching anyone. That was 93 of 529 calls, or 18%, and most of its 121 missed calls.

Voicemail didn’t save many calls either. 385 callers reached a voicemail greeting, and 214 of them, 56%, hung up without leaving a message.

Paid calls weren’t answered any better

724 of the calls came from paid ads. 196 of them, 27%, were missed, the same rate as every other call. Where calls ring one person, 118 of 245 paid calls were missed. That is 48% of calls the business had already paid for.

How to check your own calls

• Count answered and missed calls. Your carrier, your call tracking or your Google Business Profile shows both. Use the last 30 days.
• Write down who answers. If the honest answer is “me, when I can,” compare your rate with the 43% here.
• Check your ad numbers on their own. A missed paid call costs you the click and the customer.
• Call yourself. Ring your own number at 10 in the morning. Listen for whether a person, a menu or a voicemail picks up, and how long it takes.

What fixes it

The businesses that answer well have someone on the phone during the day. If that can’t be you, it can be an office hire, a call center without a long menu, or an AI receptionist that answers the calls you miss in your business’s name, books the visit and sends you the details. We built ours for trades like HVAC and impact windows.

Want to see your own numbers? If you track calls, we’ll run the same check on your data for free. Ask for a missed-call check.

How we counted

The data comes from the call tracking of 11 Florida businesses from May 1 to October 13, 2026: 2,715 calls. They are two HVAC companies, a window and door company, a flooring contractor, a paver contractor, an interior-finishing company, a marine contractor, a building-materials supplier, a logistics company, a law firm and a professional-services firm. They are not a random sample. All of them track their calls, and most of them advertise.

We sorted each call from its recording: a person picked up, it rang out, it went to voicemail or to a mailbox that wasn’t set up, or the caller hung up in a phone menu. We set aside 274 calls too short to tell and 73 robocalls, sales pitches, job seekers and wrong numbers, so the rates use the other 2,368 calls. If every too-short call were a miss, the overall answer rate would be 66% instead of 73%. Paid calls are the ones the call tracking tied to a paid ad click. We grouped each business by who answers its calls, based on the recordings. We don’t name the businesses.

You’re welcome to cite these numbers. Please link to this page as the source.

Keep reading: why most missed calls come in during business hours, We tracked 202 calls to a Florida contractor and why we say hang up (and why your callers still do).