How many HVAC calls are you missing?

Every owner has a guess. The guess is always low.

It is low for a good reason: you only remember the misses you found out about, and the whole problem with a missed call is that it does not announce itself. The ones that hurt are the ones you never learned had happened.

Good news is you do not need to estimate. The number is already recorded in several places, and pulling it takes an afternoon.

1. Your carrier's call log

Start here, because it is the most complete record you have and almost nobody looks at it.

Log into the account for the number on your trucks. Whatever your provider calls it, there is a call detail record: every inbound call, the time, the duration, and how it ended. What you want are the calls with a duration of zero or a few seconds, and anything that went to voicemail.

Pull a full month, ideally your busiest recent one. Count the ring-outs.

Two things to watch for. First, calls that connected for eight seconds are usually not conversations, they are somebody hearing your greeting start and hanging up, so count those as misses. Second, if you have call forwarding to a cell phone, check both records, because a call that forwarded and then went unanswered can look answered on one log and missed on the other.

2. Your Google Business Profile

If customers find you on a map listing, the calls placed from that button are counted for you.

Look at the calls reported there and compare against what shows up in your carrier log as answered. The gap between "people who tapped to call you" and "conversations that happened" is a clean measure of the leak, and it is coming from your highest-intent source, because somebody tapping the call button on a map result is ready to book right now.

3. Your field service software or CRM

Whatever you dispatch from will tell you how many jobs were booked in the same period. That is your denominator.

Answered calls versus booked jobs is a separate and also useful number, but the one you want here is booked jobs versus total inbound calls. Most shops are surprised twice: once by how many calls did not connect, and once by how many connected calls did not become anything.

4. Your own phone

If you take calls on a cell phone, the missed-call list is right there. Scroll a busy week and count.

Two-minute version of this whole exercise: look at last Saturday.

5. The one nobody thinks of, which is your voicemail box

Not the count of messages. The count of messages relative to the ring-outs from step one.

If forty calls rang out and you have three messages, you have just measured how little voicemail is doing for you. That ratio is usually brutal and it is the fastest way to stop treating voicemail as coverage. More on that in what voicemail costs an HVAC company.

Turning the count into a number that matters

Now do the arithmetic with your own figures, not averages.

Take the ring-outs for the month. Assume you would have won only a fraction of them, and be pessimistic, because some were sales calls and some were wrong numbers and some had already booked elsewhere before you would have replied. Multiply what is left by your average ticket.

Then do it again with your average replacement value on a small slice of that number, because some of those calls were replacement inquiries and you have no way of knowing which. That second line is the one that tends to change people's minds.

Whatever the total is, it repeats every month, and it is worst in the months you are busiest.

What the number will not tell you

Which calls they were. That information is gone, and it is not recoverable.

That is the actual reason to fix the mechanism rather than to keep measuring it. You cannot go back and win last July's ring-outs, and no report will tell you whether the eleven-second call at 6:42 on a Thursday was a filter or a furnace.

Some of what you have lost is still sitting in your records, though, and that part is worth an afternoon: the recoverable half.

Where to look once you have it

If the number is small and your calendar is full, leave it alone, and read why more captured calls can hurt a booked-out shop before you spend anything.

If the number is meaningful, the fix is not answering faster. You are already working. It is having something that reaches the caller in the seconds after the ring, before they dial the next name, which is the whole mechanism in missed call to booked job.

Orelle reports this number as a matter of course, so on the shops we build for it stops being an afternoon of log-pulling once a year and becomes a line you glance at on a Monday.

Do the count yourself first though, this week, before you talk to any vendor including us. An owner who knows their own ring-out number cannot be sold nonsense, and an owner who does not know it will believe whatever the last salesperson told them.