Answering the Phone When You Are on a Roof

What a missed call actually costs

Somebody with a problem phones three businesses. The one who answers gets the conversation.

Most callers to a trade do not leave a message. Of those who do, some have already booked somebody else by the time you call back.

Which makes a missed call from a new enquiry a substantially larger loss than a missed call from an existing customer, who will try again.

The difficulty is that you cannot tell which is which without answering.

Why you cannot simply answer

Worth acknowledging, because the advice to answer every call is useless to somebody working.

You are up a ladder, under a floor, holding something with both hands, or in a customer's house mid-conversation. Answering is impossible, unsafe, or rude.

And answering while distracted is frequently worse than not answering. A rushed two-minute call taken on a roof produces a poor impression and a half-written note.

So the question is not how to answer more calls. It is what happens to the ones you cannot take.

The options, in rough order of cost

• A useful voicemail, free, and better than most businesses manage.
• A text sent automatically when you miss a call.
• Diverting to somebody else during working hours.
• A call answering service taking messages in your business name.
• Someone employed to answer, which is a different scale of decision.

The second is under-used and cheap. A message saying you are on site and will call back within a stated period converts a missed call into a held one.

A voicemail that does something

Most voicemail greetings are the default, or a recording made years ago naming a Christmas closure.

What a useful one says: who you are, that you are on site, when you will return calls, and what to do if it is urgent.

"This is Dave at Fraser Heating. I am on site until about four and I return calls the same afternoon. If it is an emergency, please text and I will see it faster."

That gives the caller a decision to make rather than an unanswered question, and the texting suggestion genuinely works, because a text can be read on a roof and a call cannot.

A worked example

A roofer missing perhaps a dozen calls a week and returning them in the evening.

He set up an automatic text on missed calls: on site, will call back this evening, text if urgent. It took ten minutes to configure.

Two things changed. People stopped ringing repeatedly, because they knew a callback was coming. And a proportion replied by text with the detail, which meant his evening calls were shorter and better informed.

He estimates he converted several more enquiries a month, from people who would previously have phoned somebody else during the gap.

The cost was nothing beyond the setup, and the callers who wanted somebody immediately still went elsewhere, which he accepted.

The counter-case

Where investing in call handling is not the priority.

A business already at capacity, where more enquiries are a burden rather than an opportunity. There the correct answer is a voicemail saying you are booked until a stated month.

Trades where enquiries arrive almost entirely by other routes, and the phone is mostly existing customers who will try again.

And situations where an answering service would misrepresent the business, such as highly technical work where a message taken by somebody who does not understand it is worse than a callback.

The judgement is whether missed calls are costing you work you want. If they are not, the cheapest option is sufficient.

Answering services

Worth understanding before dismissing as too corporate.

A service answers in your business name, takes a message with the details you specify, and sends it to you immediately.

What it does well: capturing the caller's details and the nature of the job, so your callback starts from something.

What it does badly: anything requiring knowledge of your trade, and giving prices. A caller who wants an answer now will still be dissatisfied.

Cost is usually per call or a small monthly minimum, and for a business losing several enquiries a week it frequently pays for itself. For one losing two a month it does not.

Calling back well

The part that determines whether the recovery works.

Call back when you said you would. A stated callback time that is missed is worse than none, because it was a promise.

Open by acknowledging it: returning your call from this afternoon, sorry to miss you, I was on a roof. That is honest and it explains rather than apologising vaguely.

And have the details to hand. A callback that begins by asking them to explain everything again wastes the advantage the message gave you.

Setting expectations on the website

The half of this that happens before anybody phones.

A site saying you are usually on site during the day and return calls each afternoon tells somebody what to expect before they dial.

That converts an unanswered ring from a bad experience into an expected one, and it encourages people to use the route that suits you: a form, a text, or a message.

It also filters. Somebody who needs an answer within the hour reads that and either phones anyway or goes elsewhere, and both outcomes are better than them waiting all afternoon feeling ignored.

One line near the phone number is enough, and it should say what actually happens rather than what you would like to happen.

What to do about the ones you lose anyway

Some calls are lost regardless, and that is not a failure.

Somebody with water coming through a ceiling will phone until somebody answers, and if that is not you it will be somebody else. No system fixes that except being available.

What is worth knowing is roughly how many you are losing, which most businesses have never measured.

Most phones will show missed calls over a period. Counting a fortnight tells you whether this is a small annoyance or a significant leak, and that number decides how much it is worth spending.

How the number itself should be set up so calls reach you at all is covered in taking a business phone number with you.

Frequently asked questions

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