Your Phone Rang. Do You Know Who Answered?

Our team has been making a lot of phone calls to local service businesses lately, mostly plumbing and HVAC companies, and a lot of those calls end the same way. The phone rings a few times, and then a voicemail greeting picks up. That got us thinking about missed calls from customers, and about what a new customer actually hears on the other end when nobody answers.

What the caller is doing while it rings

Most people who call a local service business aren't browsing. They're working down a list until somebody picks up. Something is leaking, something stopped working, or something needs to be fixed before the weekend, so they searched on Google, got a handful of names, and started calling them one by one.

That means the caller isn't really waiting for you. They're giving you a few rings before they move on. We say it on almost every call we have with a trade business owner, because it's true almost everywhere. The first business to answer the phone is usually the one that gets the job.

A missed call doesn't leave a complaint behind. The caller just dials the next name on the list. Nobody hears about it, nothing shows up in a report, and the job quietly goes to somebody else.

Why it happens to good businesses

None of this means the owner is careless. The people we talk to are good at the work, and that's actually the problem. The person who answers the phone is often the same person who's on a roof, in a crawl space, or driving between jobs, and those two things can't happen at the same time.

After hours makes it harder. The calls that come in at night and on weekends tend to be the urgent ones, and they're also the ones most likely to land in voicemail.

What your callers actually hear

This is the part most owners have never checked. When our calls go to voicemail, the greeting isn't always a good one. Some are the default robot voice reading the phone number back. Some say the mailbox is full. A few numbers don't connect at all. And some say “leave a message and we'll call you back,” and then the call back comes the next afternoon.

From the caller's side, those all sound about the same. A full mailbox and a robot greeting both tell a new customer the same thing. Nobody's there. And it's usually the very first impression that person gets of the business, before they've seen a single review or a single job.

How to check missed calls from customers this week

This part is easy, and it doesn't cost anything. Call your own business after hours and listen to it the way a stranger would. Then do it again during a busy part of the day. Use a phone that isn't yours, so it rings the way it would for anyone else.

Then ask yourself a few plain questions. Did anyone pick up, and how many rings did it take? If nobody did, what did the greeting say, and did it tell the caller when they'd hear back? Was there room in the mailbox to leave a message? Is the number on your website and your Google profile the one that actually rang?

Last, look at the messages you did get this week and how long each person waited for a call back. Somebody who heard back the next afternoon may have already booked whoever answered first.

It's more fixable than it sounds

None of this needs a new phone system or a full-time receptionist to get started. It starts with knowing what your callers hear right now, because most owners have never heard it themselves. Once you've heard it, it's usually obvious what to fix first, and it's usually smaller than you expected.

Business Owners, when was the last time you called your own business and listened to what a new customer hears?