By Oleksii Pimenov, founder and chief software engineer at SimBuster
The phone always seems to ring at the worst possible moment. You’re concentrating, halfway through a job. Your hands are full. The customer in front of you needs your attention. So, you let it ring. Because your colleague is busy too. That’s the reality of running a small business. The job in front of you takes priority, so the next potential customer gets lost.
And that’s the paradox of small business. You’re very good at generating demand. Google Ads, SEO, social media, directories, local advertising, and digital sales funnels. But once you make the phone ring, you don’t have the capacity to answer it.
What happens to the customer?
98% of the time, they go somewhere else. Customers aren’t willing to wait for a call back. According to research carried out by Invoca, which took in 60 million calls across nine industries, 26% of calls from potential customers go unanswered. And only 2% of those callers will leave a voicemail. Now, this research is US-based, so you can’t necessarily treat those figures as a precise UK benchmark. But that 2% is the number that matters most. Because it shows that when you miss a call, it’s gone, and its potential goes with it, along with your investment.
The problem is that this is very hard to track. You can see what you’ve spent on ads. You can see how many calls you’ve answered, the value they bring, and often their source. But few companies track missed calls. There’s no line in the monthly report saying “potential customers we didn’t answer”. So, you’ve no way of understanding your lost value. But suffice it to say, if someone has already searched for your business, picked up their phone and called, the expensive part of getting their attention has already happened.
Callers are closer to buying
It’s easy to dismiss a few missed calls. They’re probably just enquiries anyway; if they’re real buyers they’ll call back. But that’s actually not the case. BIA/Kelsey research published in 2014-16 found that around 25-40% of inbound calls to local businesses became customers, compared with roughly 2% of web-form leads. And showed that phone-call conversion rates were around 10-15 times higher than web leads. So, when you miss a call, you miss a genuine opportunity.
You can’t pick up every call
Of course I know that’s not possible, even at enterprise level. Small businesses don’t stand a chance. Especially if you work in a physical trade. If you’re up to your elbows in plumbing, there are times you simply can’t stop. Instead, it pays to be aware of when you’re missing calls.
If calls cluster around lunchtime or spike after 5pm, maybe you can arrange additional cover for an hour. Or block off a period immediately after to return any calls you’ve missed. The timing and the response will change from business to business. But the knowledge can inform you to make the changes that you need to help your business grow.
The cheapest growth may already be calling
The UK advertising market is forecast to pass £50bn in 2026, according to Advertising Association/WARC forecasts. All businesses are spending more to get in front of potential customers. Of course they are; it makes complete sense. But it’s only of value if you have the capacity to handle the enquiries that advertising generates. If you don’t, that investment is entirely wasted. I know. I’ve done it myself.
Sometimes growth just isn’t about getting in front of new people. It’s about changing the way you work so that you can do a better job of handling the ones you’ve already paid for. Every enquiry costs money in one way or another. But the calls you missed yesterday have already come out of the budget.
So maybe before you next increase your marketing budget, find out one simple thing: how many potential customers are already trying to call you, and what happens when they do. If you don’t know that, more spend just makes the problem more expensive. The answer might not be a bigger budget or a call centre, but a small change or a piece of technology that changes how the calls you’re already paying for get handled.
