Every trade loses something different when the phone goes unanswered — a locksmith loses a $150 lockout, a roofer loses a $15,000 replacement. This guide puts illustrative numbers on each trade so you can run the math for your own shop. Nothing here is a industry statistic; these are worked examples with clearly labeled assumptions. Plug in your real average job values and the conclusion writes itself.
How to think about the cost (the honest version)
A missed call costs you the expected value of that caller: your average job value, times the chance the caller would have hired you, times the chance they hire someone else instead of waiting. You don't need precise research for this — you need your own numbers. Take your average ticket, estimate what share of callers are ready to hire (for emergency trades it's most of them), and assume the unanswered ones mostly don't wait. The result is always larger than contractors expect, because the calls you remember are the ones you answered.
Illustrative math, trade by trade
- HVAC: assume an average repair ticket of a few hundred dollars and a replacement of several thousand. Even if only one in ten missed calls would have become a job, a single recovered repair covers months of a $39–79 text-back service; a replacement covers years.
- Plumbing: assume emergency calls average a few hundred dollars and water heater or sewer jobs run into the thousands. Plumbing skews urgent, so a high share of missed calls are hire-ready — the expected value per missed call is among the highest of any trade.
- Electrical: assume service calls of a few hundred dollars, with panel upgrades and EV chargers in the low thousands. Mix a steady stream of troubleshooting calls with occasional big tickets and the average missed call is worth far more than the monthly cost of catching it.
- Roofing: assume repairs in the high hundreds and full replacements well into five figures. Roofing has the most extreme math — a single recovered replacement inquiry can be worth a decade of text-back service.
- Locksmith: assume lockouts and rekeys in the low hundreds. Lower ticket, but extremely high urgency — nearly every missed call is a hire-ready customer who dials the next listing within a minute.
- Appliance repair: assume service calls in the low-to-mid hundreds. Lower urgency than plumbing, but the callers who do reach out are usually ready to book — they just need someone to answer.
The pattern across all six: the monthly cost of a text-back service ($39–79) is a rounding error next to even one recovered job in most trades. You don't need industry benchmarks to see it — your own average ticket and a realistic guess at your missed-call volume is enough.
The number most shops get wrong
Contractors consistently underestimate how many calls they miss, because the evidence deletes itself — a caller who hires your competitor never appears in your records. If you want a real number, check your carrier's call log against your answered calls for one week, or just count the voicemails you never returned the same day. Most shops are surprised, and some are horrified. Either way, now you have a real input for the math above.
What the math means for text-back
Text-back doesn't need to be perfect to pay for itself — it needs to recover a single job a year in most trades. Everything beyond that is found money. The question isn't whether the math works; it's whether you're comfortable continuing to donate the difference to whichever competitor answers first.
A one-week exercise to get your real number
Stop guessing. For one week, log every inbound call from your carrier's call history: answered, missed, and returned. For each missed call, note whether the caller hired someone (ask when you finally reach them — most will tell you). Multiply your missed-and-lost count by your average ticket. That single number, from your own records, is worth more than any industry benchmark — and for most shops, it's the most motivating figure they'll see all year.
What catching one looks like
That exchange took about a minute and captured a next-day service call — worth, illustratively, several months of the text-back service. Now imagine it happening every week.
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