Plumbing work splits into two kinds of calls. There's the planned stuff: a new water heater, a bathroom rough-in, a faucet swap someone has been meaning to get to. Then there's the call from a person watching water spread across a basement floor. That second caller will not wait long, and they will not leave a detailed voicemail.
Both kinds of call get missed when you're under a sink with your hands full. The question worth asking is what those missed calls add up to over a month, and the only honest way to answer it is with your own numbers.
An example you can change
Everything in this section is invented for illustration. None of it comes from a real plumbing company, and your figures will be different.
- For this example, picture a two-van shop that gets 25 calls a week.
- In this example, 5 of those calls ring out while both plumbers are on jobs.
- For illustration, say the shop ends up doing work for 6 out of every 10 callers it reaches, which is plausible for urgent calls where the caller needs someone today.
- In the example, a typical job averages $300 between drain calls, repairs and the occasional bigger install.
In that example, 3 of the 5 missed callers would likely have hired the shop, which works out to about $900 of work in the example week. Across a month, the example adds up to several thousand dollars, and that ignores the chance that one of those callers needed a water heater or a sewer line repair.
Emergency callers are the ones you lose first
The caller with a leaking pipe is the least patient person who will ever dial your number. They're not comparing reviews. They're working down the list until someone answers. A voicemail greeting, however friendly, reads to them as "not available."
That's also a call worth catching, because urgent work tends to be booked on the spot and often leads to a longer relationship. The household that you helped on a bad night is the household that calls you for the water heater next year.
Where a text-back fits
A missed-call text-back sends a short text to anyone whose call goes unanswered, a few seconds after it rings out. The caller sees your business name and a question: what's going on, and is water actively leaking? They can answer in a sentence.
That reply won't stop the leak, and it doesn't commit them to you. Some will still call around. But many people will hold on a little longer when they know a real business has their message and will call back. You still need to make that call, and the faster the better.
Check it against your own week
Look at your phone's recent calls. Count the missed ones from numbers you don't know, then think about how many of those you'd normally have turned into work. Put your own figures into our missed-call cost calculator, which shows the result as an estimate built only from what you entered.
If the estimate is small, that's useful to know too. Not every shop needs this, and it's better to decide from your own call log than from anyone's sales pitch.
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.