The Business Customer Who Called Three Times and Didn’t Get an Answer

Is there anything worse than a company that doesn’t pick up?

Here I am literally trying to give them my money.

I call once, no answer. People get busy, fair enough. Let’s try again? Same result. By the third time, patience is wearing thin, and its at this point the doubt creeps in. Maybe I should try someone who seems like they’re interested in my needs.

For the business, those three missed calls barely register. For the customer? It’s a lifelong brand experience pretty much guaranteed to be shared with their associates. Which is why missed calls are actually a bigger problem than they initially appear.

How Do We Quantify An Unanswered Call?

Off the bat, it’s almost impossible to universally value a missed call when we don’t know why the person was calling.

Maybe they wanted to ask about operating hours, or maybe it was an existing customer needing support. However, it could easily have been a new prospect ready to pull the trigger, a big retainer in the making, or an entry-level client who wanted to upgrade. The uncomfortable part? You’ll probably never know. Which is kind of worse than knowing, if you think about it.

Every business invests time, effort, and money into generating leads. Marketing does its thing, sales swear they’re pushing hard, websites are optimised and redone AGAIN, and budgets are scrutinised to the umpteenth degree to squeeze out every cost per click under the sun. Yet it’s all in vain when one of those leads finally calls, yet nobody answers.

Suddenly all the work gone into creating an opportunity matters a lot less.

Unfortunately, Your Customer Doesn’t Care Why You Missed the Call

There can be perfectly reasonable explanations for an unanswered phone.

Your receptionist might already be helping another customer. Your sales team could be in meetings. Someone might be working from home, travelling between appointments or away from their desk for five minutes. None of those things make you a badly run business.

The problem? Your customer doesn’t have that context.

They don’t see an internal team juggling meetings, deadlines and customer requests. They simply experience a company that isn’t answering its phone. Again. After one attempt, they’ll probably forgive it. After two, they’ll become irritated. After three, you’re relying heavily on their willingness to keep trying and hoping they don’t vent on Social Media (they always do).

In a competitive market, that’s not something you want to rely on.

Truthfully, The Customer You Lose Probably Won’t Tell You

Customer complaints are uncomfortable, but at least they’re visible. If somebody tells you that your service was poor, you have an opportunity to investigate the problem and fix it. Missed calls, however, don’t give you that luxury.

“Best” case, the customer you lost tags you on Twitter and allows you to respond or rectify. But in most cases, they don’t seek closure and detail your broken customer journey point. From your side, nothing appears to have happened. There was no cancelled contract, angry review or formal complaint. You just never received the business in the first place.

That makes missed calls particularly dangerous because the problem can remain hidden. If you don’t have visibility of your incoming calls, you may not even realise how many opportunities are disappearing.

The Office Has Changed. Your Phone System Should Have Too.

Business used to make things relatively easy for the humble telephone. Employees came into the same building every morning, sat at the same desks and answered the phones sitting next to them. Today’s workplace is considerably messier. People work from home, move between branches, spend time at customer sites and take calls while travelling. Teams can be distributed across different cities or even countries. Hybrid work has made employees more mobile, but customers haven’t lowered their expectations because of it.

They still expect to be able to reach your business.

That’s where the way a company handles calls becomes important. A business phone number shouldn’t become useless simply because the person attached to a particular extension isn’t sitting at their desk.

Modern business communication platforms can route calls between employees, departments and devices, allowing calls to follow the business rather than a physical telephone. Features such as call queues, hunt groups, forwarding, voicemail and mobile or desktop applications can help ensure that an unavailable employee doesn’t automatically become an unavailable company. Just as importantly, reporting can show businesses what is actually happening when customers call.

Because “we don’t get many calls” and “we don’t answer many calls” are two very different things.

Do You Actually Know How Many Calls You’re Missing?

It’s worth testing your own business from the customer’s side.

Call your main number during a busy period and see what happens. If the first person doesn’t answer, does the call move somewhere else? Does it ring endlessly? Does it reach voicemail? Can somebody working remotely answer it? If the caller gives up, does anyone know the call was missed and need to follow up?

These aren’t really telecommunications questions. They’re customer experience questions.

Your phone system is one of the ways customers enter your business. It deserves the same scrutiny you give your website, contact forms, social media messages and support channels.

If you can measure website abandonment, email response times and digital leads but have no idea how many customers hang up before speaking to someone, there’s a fairly significant gap in the picture.

You Worked Hard to Make the Phone Ring

No business will answer every call immediately, and that’s not the point. Employees have meetings. Lines get busy. People take lunch. Sometimes several customers genuinely do call at exactly the same time.

What matters is what happens next.

The right communication setup gives that call somewhere to go and gives your team visibility when it isn’t answered. It reduces the dependence on one person, one extension or one physical location being available at exactly the right moment.

Businesses invest heavily in getting customers to notice them, click on them, enquire and eventually make contact. Once someone has gone through all of that and actually picked up the phone, making them fight to speak to you is a strange place to lose them.

Especially because the customer who called three times probably isn’t going to call a fourth.