The real cost of a missed call for UK tradespeople
34% of UK tradespeople have lost work directly because they didn't answer their phone. Here's what unanswered callouts actually cost a plumbing, electrical, or roofing firm every month — and how to stop the bleed.
A Fix Radio survey of over 220 UK tradespeople found that 34% had lost work directly because they didn’t answer their phone — and 60% regularly struggle to take calls while on site. For a trade business, that’s not a customer-service problem. It’s a revenue problem.
Why trades miss so many callouts
It’s not laziness — it’s physics. Your best people are the ones on the tools. When the phone rings, the plumber’s under a sink, the sparky’s in a consumer unit, the gas engineer’s mid-service. The phone rings out. The customer moves on.
The part owners underestimate: voicemail doesn’t save you
When someone has a burst pipe or no heating in January, they don’t leave a voicemail and wait. They hang up and ring the next tradesperson on Google. A missed callout is almost always a lost callout.
Do the maths on your own business
Here’s the simple formula:
Missed calls per month × your close rate × average job value = monthly lost revenue
Say you miss 10 calls a week. That’s roughly 43 a month. If you’d close 40% of them at a £380 average ticket, that’s over £6,500 a month walking out the door — more than £78,000 a year.
Run your own numbers with our missed-callout calculator.
How to stop the bleed
You don’t need to hire a full-time receptionist. A 24/7 AI receptionist answers every callout in one ring, captures the lead, flags emergencies, and texts you the details instantly — so a call you’d have missed becomes a booked job instead of a competitor’s.