What are missed calls actually costing you?

These are decent starting points, not verified facts about any specific business. They're the most commonly repeated figures in this space, but the primary sources behind them are thinner than the volume of citations suggests — several trace back to a single dated study, or to companies that sell phone-answering products and have a direct interest in the number being large. Treat every default here as directional, not authoritative.

The one figure in this tool backed by an independent source with no stake in the outcome is the home-services value-per-job range, which draws on Service Roundtable contractor benchmarking data. Everything else — restaurant miss rates, call volumes across every vertical, and all nightlife/VIP figures — is a reasonable planning assumption, not a citation you should repeat as settled fact.

This calculator exists to get a conversation started, not to hand over a defensible number. The only real number is the one built from your own actual call volume and average ticket — which is exactly what the sliders above are for.

Two sliders have no benchmark behind them at all, on purpose. The first is "how much of that extra business could you actually take on." Not every missed call is free money - if you're already at capacity, answering more calls doesn't create more tables, techs, or hours in the day. That's entirely your judgment call, not an industry number, which is why it starts around 35-70% depending on the business type instead of 100%.

The second is the weekly routine-call estimate. There isn't a trustworthy universal benchmark for how many hours your team burns on repetitive phone questions, and pretending there is would make the tool look more precise than it really is. That one should come straight from your own gut check of how often the phone pulls someone away from real work.

The automatic "lower end" pop-up compares your number only to this tool's own starting assumption for your business type, not an external industry standard — treat it as a prompt to double-check, not a diagnosis.

A few more things worth knowing. For order-driven businesses, some of this "loss" isn't fully gone — a customer who can't get through sometimes orders through a delivery app instead, so part of the number above is really a margin loss (the commission cut), not a total loss. This estimate also isn't a promise of what any solution recovers — it's the size of the gap today, not a guaranteed result after a fix. And it assumes a fairly typical month; real call volume swings with season, weather, and local events, so treat this as a representative month, not an annual guarantee.