12–22% of inbound calls go unanswered during peak hours. Each one is a $300–$800 job that went to a competitor — or more likely, nowhere at all. The math compounds fast, and most operators have no idea what their actual answer rate is.
The instinct is to measure a missed call by the job it didn't book. That understates the damage. A customer who calls and doesn't get through rarely calls back. The competitor who answers gets the relationship — and in HVAC, a relationship is worth considerably more than one job.
At a $450 average ticket and a 3.5x LTV multiplier from membership and recurring service, one unanswered call represents $1,575 in lifetime revenue not captured. That's the number worth tracking, not the ticket value of the individual call.
Most operators who think about call capture think about it in terms of individual jobs. The operators who fix it think about it in terms of customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. You're spending money to make phones ring. When those calls go unanswered, the acquisition spend evaporates.
Call volume spikes during peak season. Staffing doesn't. The result is predictable: the hours with the highest inbound volume are often the hours with the least CSR availability. Phones ring during dispatch hand-offs, tech check-ins, break overlaps, and the mid-morning surge when customers realize their system failed overnight.
Data from comparable operators shows missed call rates double between May and August. The combination of higher volume and constrained capacity creates a compounding effect: more calls coming in, fewer answered, higher abandonment, more customers reaching the next number on their list.
The operators who manage this well plan for the surge. They pull historical call volume by hour for the previous peak season and staff against the shape of that curve — not a flat assumption about how many CSRs they need.
Most operators use a simple ratio: calls answered divided by calls received. That's the wrong denominator. It includes calls under 10 seconds (likely misdials and robocalls) and calls that arrive outside business hours when you're not staffed to answer. Including those inflates your apparent answer rate and masks the real operational gap.
The correct measurement filters to business hours and excludes sub-10-second calls. Within that window, two metrics matter: first-ring-to-answer rate (how quickly calls are being picked up) and abandonment rate by hour of day (which hours are producing the most unanswered calls).
Most phone systems — including those integrated with ServiceTitan — can produce this data. Most operators have never pulled it. The abandonment rate by hour of day report is the single most useful thing you can generate from your call system this week.
The answer to a missed call problem isn't a single intervention. It's a system of four components working together. Most operators have one or two. The ones who've closed the gap have all four.
Open your phone system's reporting dashboard. Pull call answer rate by hour for the last 30 days. If you have a call tracking integration with your FSM, run the same report there.
Identify the three peak hours with the highest abandonment rate. Those three hours are your highest-cost operational gap right now. Quantify them: abandonment count by hour, multiplied by average ticket and conversion rate. That's the dollar value of the problem you're looking at.
Most operators who run this analysis for the first time are surprised by the number. It's rarely a rounding error. It's usually a six-figure annual revenue gap hiding in a report that takes 15 minutes to pull.
Back-of-house call capture is one of four lanes we audit in the first 30 days. We'll show you your answer rate by hour and quantify what a 5-point improvement is worth annually.
45-minute diagnostic — No costThe 45-minute diagnostic starts with your call data. We'll quantify the gap and show you what closing it is worth annually.
No pitch. No obligation. Just the numbers.