We Tracked 202 Calls to a Florida Contractor. 62% Never Reached a Person.

Every owner of a busy service business suspects they miss some calls. Very few know how many. So we pulled five and a half months of call tracking from one Florida home-services company and counted every call. The missed calls were not a small leak. Most callers never reached a person.

What the missed calls looked like

Out of 202 tracked calls, only 52 became a real conversation. That is 26%. Another 126 calls, or 62%, rang out, went to voicemail or reached a mailbox that had never been set up. In total, 110 callers, more than half, never got to say what they wanted.

Nobody was ignoring the phone. The owners were out doing the work, which is exactly what you want from them. The problem is that the phone and the job happen at the same time.

It isn’t an after-hours problem

The easy assumption is that missed calls happen at night and on weekends. They don’t. Of the 126 missed calls, 107 came in Monday to Friday between 8 and 5. That is 85%. The calls went unanswered during working hours, while the owners were on a job.

That changes the fix. An after-hours answering service would have caught very little here. What this business needed was someone, or something, to pick up during the day when the owners couldn’t.

Missed calls from paid ads cost twice

80 of the calls came from paid ads. 45 of them, 56%, were missed. Every one of those calls started with a click the business paid for. When a paid call rings out, you pay for the lead and lose it in the same moment, and the caller usually tries the next company on the list.

Voicemail doesn’t save the call

Most owners count on voicemail as a backstop. The data says callers don’t use it. In one of the two markets, 88 people called over five and a half months and only 3 left a message. Seven callers heard that the mailbox wasn’t set up at all, three of them on a paid ad number. Of the 78 callers who did say what they wanted, 31 only ever reached voicemail.

People calling a contractor want an answer, not a beep. If nobody picks up, most hang up and call someone else.

How to check your own missed calls

• Pull your call log. Your phone carrier’s call log or your call tracking tool shows answered and missed calls. Count both for the last 30 days. (Google Business Profile stopped keeping call history in 2024, so don’t count on it for this.)
• Split by time of day. Count how many missed calls came in during your working hours. If it’s most of them, voicemail and after-hours services won’t fix it.
• Check your ad numbers separately. If you run ads with their own tracking number, look at that number on its own. Those calls cost you money before anyone picks up.
• Call yourself. On a weekday at 10 in the morning, call your own business number and let it ring. Listen to exactly what a new customer hears.

Then do the simple math: missed calls in a month, times how many of those callers usually become customers, times your average job. For most service businesses the answer is bigger than the cost of fixing it.

What fixes missed calls

The fix has to work during the day, while you’re busy. A few options, from cheapest to most complete:

• Set up the voicemail box and record a greeting that tells callers when you’ll call back. It’s free and it stops the worst outcome.
• Text back missed callers automatically, so they hear from you before they call the next company.
• Answer every call with an AI receptionist that picks up the calls you miss in your business’s name, books the visit and sends you the details. We built one for trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical and roofing.

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

How we counted

The data comes from the call tracking of one Florida home-services company that serves two markets, from May 1 to October 13, 2026: 202 tracked calls in total. A call counts as a real conversation when the caller reached one of the owners and talked through their request. A missed call rang out, went to voicemail, or reached a mailbox that wasn’t set up. We don’t name the company.

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

Keep reading: Why we say hang up (and why your callers still do), 6 AI services for small business worth paying for and why hold music sounds so awful.