Heating and cooling calls come in bunches. The first cold night in October, the first humid week in June, and the phones at every HVAC shop in Metro Detroit light up at once. Those are the same days your techs are busiest, which means those are the days a call is likeliest to ring out.
It helps to put rough numbers on what that means for your shop. The figures below are made up. They're a worked example meant to show the arithmetic, and you should replace each one with what you see in your own call log.
A worked example
- For this example, say the shop gets 40 calls in a busy week.
- In the example, 8 of those calls go unanswered because everyone is on a job or driving.
- For illustration, assume the shop books 4 out of every 10 callers it actually talks to.
- And in this example, the average booked job is a $350 repair visit.
Run that through and the example shop has roughly 3 missed callers a week who would have booked, or about $1,050 of repair work in that example week. That's only repairs. If one of those callers was pricing a full furnace or AC replacement, the example number moves a lot, because a single replacement can be worth more than a month of service calls.
Why the missed ones rarely call back
Someone with no heat isn't in a patient mood. When they hit voicemail, the easiest thing to do is go back to the search results and tap the next company. Many don't leave a message at all, so you're left with a number you don't recognize and no idea whether it was a tune-up or a dead blower motor.
The loss isn't the missed call itself. Nobody can answer every call from an attic. The loss is the silence in the minute after, while the homeowner is still holding their phone and deciding who to try next.
What a text-back changes, and what it doesn't
A missed-call text-back sends that caller a short text within seconds of the call going unanswered. It tells them who they reached and asks what they need. They can reply with "no heat, furnace is making a clicking noise," and you see that when you're back in the truck.
It won't book the job for you, and it won't win back every caller. Some people will still call the next shop. What it does is give the caller a reason to wait for you instead of silence. You still have to call back, and quickly.
Use your own numbers
The honest way to decide whether this is worth paying for is to use your own figures, not ours. Pull a week of missed calls from your phone, estimate how many you'd normally book, and use your typical ticket. Our missed-call cost calculator does the arithmetic for you and labels the result as what it is: an estimate from your own inputs.
If the number it gives you is small, you may not need a text-back. If it's larger than you expected, that's worth knowing either way.
Related reading
Missed-Call Text-Back is a text-back tool: it replies to the calls you can't pick up, and it doesn't answer calls for you. It's $89/mo list, or $49/mo at the founding rate while founding spots last, billed monthly with no contract. If it sounds like a fit, see how Missed-Call Text-Back works.