What happens to the enquiries that come in after you close

01What your call log leaves unanswered

Many costs in a business arrive with something that prompts you. A bad month shows up in the bank. A slow supplier gets chased.

A missed enquiry is different. Your phone may notify you of a missed call, and a call log that records missed calls holds it either way. What the log does not tell you is whether the enquiry became lost work: whether the caller reached you in the end, went elsewhere, or was somebody you would have wanted. Nobody complains, and no total in your accounts moves, because a job you never heard about was never quoted. The outcome is the part you have to go and check.

02Why the caller does not try again

Think about the last time you needed a trade or a professional yourself. How far down the list did you get, and what did you do when the first number did not pick up? What you did is not evidence about your customers. It is useful only for making the question concrete.

The thing to design around is that someone with a problem is looking for an answer, not for your business specifically. Being the first useful response can matter more than being the best option, because the best option that answers on Thursday is competing against a good-enough option that answered at four minutes past.

Check voicemail rather than assuming. Count the voicemails you received last month against the calls you missed. A low count tells you callers are not leaving messages. A high count does not tell you the work came back, because a message you returned is not the same as a job you won. Take a handful and follow each one through to whether it became a job.

03Find out what it is costing you first

Before spending anything, get the number. Four steps. Most of what goes into the answer comes from your own records, and the one part that does not gets labelled as what it is.

Ask what call records you can get. Put the question to your mobile provider and to whoever supplies your phone system: what record of received and missed calls can you give me, with times, and how far back does it go. I cannot tell you what yours holds. If neither can produce missed calls with times, the rest of this starts with a phone system that can.

Count the missed ones over a normal month. Put the ones from numbers already in your contacts into a second pile rather than discarding them, and follow a few through. An existing customer who could not get through about an urgent job is still a missed enquiry.

Look at when they land. Read the times rather than the total. Calls lost after five are one problem. Calls lost in the middle of the working day, while you are on a job, are a different problem with a different fix.

Clean the count before you value it. What you have is call events, and what you want is enquiries. Merge two attempts only where something confirms they are about the same enquiry: the voicemail, the conversation that followed, or the job you eventually booked. The same customer can call about two different jobs, and a shared household or office number can be two different people. Where nothing confirms it, keep them separate and mark them unknown. Take out the numbers you recognise as spam. Then check what is left against your bookings: a caller you missed on Tuesday and booked on Wednesday was not lost.

Then put a range on it, and say which part is a guess. Write the sum out. Over one month: the enquiries left after cleaning, times an assumed rate for how many of them a faster reply would actually bring back, times your contribution on a job of that kind, set against what the fix costs over the same month. Two of those numbers are yours. The rate is not, and cannot be got out of call records, so pick a pessimistic figure and an optimistic one and label both as assumptions. Use contribution rather than the invoice value, because contribution is the part available to pay for a fix.

If both ends of the range clear the cost, act. If neither does, spend the attention elsewhere. If only the optimistic end clears it, what you have is an unknown rather than a no, and the question becomes whether a bounded trial, a fixed number of weeks at a cost agreed in advance, is worth running to find out.

04The first thing to try

If the number is not small, the first fix is not a new phone system.

An automatic text back to a missed call, saying who you are and when you will call back. You could add that you are on a job, but an automatic message repeats whatever it was given, so decide what it says for each part of the day. If the message arrives, the caller has a name and a time where a moment ago they had nothing, and the conversation has moved to a channel you can pick up between jobs.

Sending the message does not establish that it arrived. A message can fail to send, and a message that was sent can come back marked undelivered. Whether a particular number can be messaged at all is a question for the supplier too, because a number that is not a mobile may still be eligible to be enabled for messaging. Ask what delivery status your supplier reports, and read it rather than assuming the send worked. Judge the whole thing on work that came back rather than on replies.

Two things to get right before you judge it.

Speed. Within a minute or two. A reply that arrives after they have reached someone else is a reply to a decision already made.

Honesty. Say a real time and hold it. A broken promise is a worse position to be in than a silent phone, because now they have heard from you.

05What to leave alone for now

Do not put an automated voice on your phone before you have measured. A system that answers every call sounds like the complete solution and is a larger commitment to unwind. It puts a machine in front of your customers, which is a decision worth making deliberately. Text back first, see what it recovers, then decide.

Do not advertise hours you do not keep. Putting "24/7" on your website because a competitor has it is a promise, and the person who calls at nine on a Sunday is the one who finds out whether you meant it.

Do not automate the conversation that wins the work. The text back is an opening, not the conversation. What you say next, while you are working out what they need and what it will cost, is you. Routine steps around it are different: an appointment reminder or a booking confirmation the customer has already agreed to is not a machine negotiating a job.

06The same evening, two businesses

What follows is a look further down the road: an answering service that speaks to the caller and writes into your calendar. It is a separate and more involved piece of work, and not what you would buy first.

Imagine two fictional plumbers receiving the same call at ten past five. The first is closed, so it goes to voicemail. He hears it in the morning, calls back in a gap between jobs, and reaches a person who has already phoned somebody else.

The second is also closed. The call is answered, a routine job is booked into a slot he has already marked bookable, the customer gets a confirmation text, and the details are on his schedule when he opens it. Anything outside those limits is taken as a message for him rather than booked. Nobody worked late.

Those two evenings are an illustration and not a customer of mine. Read it for the shape of the difference rather than as proof that the pieces connect, because whether your phone, your calendar and your texting can be joined up depends on your particular tools and the answer is sometimes no.

07Where to start

You do not need a phone strategy. Start with your call records and the questions they leave unanswered.

That is what the free hour is for. I come to you, we go through your priorities and where the gaps are, and you get a high-level direction. No obligation, and no quote on the spot, because a real quote needs a scope we have agreed together.