How To Fix Your “Missed Phone Call” Problem in 2024

Missed any calls from future customers recently?

When was the last time you checked your phone system reports for missed calls?

As a small business owner, you want to do everything you can to increase sales right?

But how many times has a potential customers called you and received no answer (voicemail doesn’t count)?

Getting poor communciation from a small business is all too common.

So answering your calls promptly and professionally is a great way to stand out.

I’d been trying to convince one of my marketing consultancy clients for a while to use a call answering service.

I knew a call answering service would:

• Put an end to potential customers getting no answer.
• Reduce the number of frustrated prospects and customers.
• Stop him feeling guilty about not answering the phone. Instead, he could work on the business to get new customers and keep existing customers.
• Give a consistent professional first interaction to his future customers.

So finally he decided to hire a call answering service for under £60 a month.

On one weekend within the first two weeks, no one was at the office.

In normal circumstances, calls would be left to go through to the answerphone. But this time, the call answering service picked it up.

That one caller became a customer.

It resulted in £6000 in profit.

That’s right.

£60 for the call answering service.

£6000 profit for a call that otherwise would have gone unanswered.

Amazing.

Can you afford not to have a call answering service?

I have no relationship or affiliation with any call answering companies.

But I am a marketing consultant.

Investing money in your marketing, but not answering the calls from prospects is a costly marketing and business error.

Call Answering: An Important Marketing Foundation Block

Answering the phone is one of the most important foundation blocks of small business marketing, especially if your marketing is focused on generating leads.

Yet unfortunately, so many businesses don’t answer their phone consistently.

Every day countless numbers of potential customers call UK small businesses. They simply need some help before buying…but no one answers the phone.

Small businesses don’t leave calls unanswered on purpose, but if your business has ever missed a call, you need to do something about it.

There are ways to fix it, so please for your sake, make sure no other call goes unanswered.

A small business that’s failing to make sure that all calls are answered have a serious problem. 

Wasted Marketing Investment

Think about all the time and money you invest in your marketing to generate phone calls.

Think about the marketing planning, strategy, the money you invest in Google Ads, Facebook Ads , SEO and email marketing.

All that investment is being wasted if people in your target market call you…but no one answers the phone. 

Wasted Potential Revenue

What’s the average amount of money a customer spends over their whole relationship with you?

Let’s say on average your customers spend £5000 with you over their lifetime as a customer.

£5000 plus whatever you’ve spent getting that phone call could potentially be going down the drain with every missed call.

You may never know.

Imagine if you never miss a phone call over the next 12 months – there would be a meaningful increase in your revenue wouldn’t there?

Improving the customer experience on your phone is a no brainer.

Do you have a call answering problem?

Many businesses don’t think they have a phone answering problem.

But what’s worse than a missed call is that many businesses don’t even know that the phone calls are being missed. 

They don’t have an easy-to-use method to track their inbound missed calls.

The best phone systems send an email to the business owner at 8pm every night to tell them about any missed calls. The business owner can then keep on top of any issues.

Have you or your team missed a call today?

But it’s not just the best phone systems that offer this missed call reporting feature.

I have a popular but basic phone system that emails me a weekly missed call report (Ring Central) – it’s certainly better than nothing. 

Many businesses will already have access to daily reports and just need to enable the reports on their phone system.

If you don’t already have this report emailed, I’d seriously recommend you now check your phone system to see how you can enable it.

Once you have those reports, make sure you keep a close eye on them to find out if all your calls are being answered.

I often give my marketing coaching clients a ‘mystery shopper’ call to see how they’re getting on with their call answering. How would you score if I called you today?

Will Voicemail solve this call answering problem?

Voicemail is not a solution.

The majority of people want to speak to a real person and don’t really want to leave a voicemail.

A potential prospect is likely to just hang up and call your competitor.

So it’s generally safe to assume that even if you have voicemail enabled you will still get many missed calls.

Reviews for Telephone Answering Services

You could, of course, hire a real receptionist to sit in your office – Indeed is often a good site to advertise your role.

Even when you hire someone there will be times when they will be unavailable, the line busy, or it’s out of hours.

Who will answer calls then? What’s your backup system?

You could even skip hiring the real employee to answer the phones and try the telephone answering service.

Here are some other call answering options – try implementing one this week:

• You can find a basic call answering service over at Jam (from around £1 a call). Their lower plan is quite basic where the call handler would simply take a message. The call handler won’t be able to answer any questions, however this is still much better than what many businesses have in place. You can upgrade to another plan so the people at Jam can answer questions too.
• I like Mi-PA as they’re a small business too which is a nice alternative to these larger call handling companies. With their service, you get someone who will learn about your business and can have a proper chat to prospects, take messages and book appointments. 
• Another alternative is The Office Genie – also a smaller company, but I’ve heard they have a slightly more expensive entry point.
• MoneyPenny is a similar call answering/handling service.    
• Answer Connect – I’ve heard good things – pricing starts from £99 per month, that not only includes call answering but also live chat and other communication, similar to the Office Genie and MoneyPenny. 

Think about your potential customers and clients. What experience do they deserve when they call you?

How can you make sure they’re WOWed every time?

Can you afford to fritter away your hard invested marketing money on missed calls?

When you’re considering whether a telephone answering service or call handling service is worth it…it only takes one missed call to miss a new customer and potentially lose hundreds or thousands of pounds over the lifetime of their relationship with you.

1. First make sure your phone system is configured to send you missed call reports, ideally daily.
2. Make sure you implement a call handling service so you never miss a call again, ideally it would cover out of office hours too.