Defaults come from industry research: plumbers miss ~62% of inbound calls, so a 60% answer rate is already generous. A 40% close rate and $450 average ticket are conservative for residential service work.
- 12 calls/weekday × 21.7 weekdays/month = 260 calls/month
- 260 calls × 40% unanswered = 104 missed calls
- 104 missed × 40% close rate = 41.7 lost jobs
- 41.7 jobs × $450 avg ticket = $18,749/month → $224,986/year
“My plumbing shop is missing ~104 calls a month — roughly $18,749/mo ($224,986/yr) in lost jobs. Run your own numbers: https://crewmateai.ca/tools/missed-call-calculator”
Your real number is almost certainly bigger
This calculator leans conservative on purpose, four ways. First, it only counts weekday calls — yet roughly 68% of plumbing emergencies happen after hours and on weekends, when nobody in a one- or two-truck shop is anywhere near the phone. That entire slice of demand is left out of the math above. Second, it treats a missed call like any other lead, closing at your normal rate. In reality a missed emergency call closes at nearly zero: 85% of emergency callers hire the first plumber who answers, and you weren’t it.
Third, it counts each lost job exactly once. But a water-heater caller you never spoke to isn’t just one lost ticket — they’re the repeat customer, the annual maintenance, the “my brother needs a plumber” referral, and the five-star review that all went to whoever picked up. Fourth, it assumes your average ticket, when the calls most likely to arrive while you’re elbow-deep in a job are emergencies — typically your largest tickets. Put together, that’s why industry research pegs missed calls at $20K to $125K a year per shop, and why the top of that range belongs to busy shops, not slow ones: the more work you have, the fewer calls you can answer.
The uncomfortable part is that answering the phone politely doesn’t recover the money by itself. A human answering service takes a message — the caller still hangs up without a price or a booked time, and the callback game starts. Recovering the revenue means finishing the call: a ballpark from a real flat-rate price book, a slot on a real calendar, a confirmation text. That’s the standard to hold any fix to — including ours. See how the full AI front office does it on the AI receptionist for plumbers page, or check flat CAD pricing.
Figures: industry research on plumbing call handling, incl. PM Magazine and Housecall Pro industry reports. Not CrewMate customer data.
Industry research on plumbing call handling — sources include PM Magazine and Housecall Pro industry reports. Not CrewMate customer data.
Missed-call questions, answered
How accurate is this missed-call calculator?+
Where do the default numbers come from?+
Why do missed calls cost plumbers so much?+
What can I actually do about missed calls?+
Now hear the fix answer a real call.
Fifteen minutes, live on a real phone line: the AI answers, quotes a ballpark from a price book, and books the job. Bring the number this calculator just showed you.