What are missed calls actually costing you?
Enter your numbers below. We’ll show you the monthly and annual cost, and what an always-on AI receptionist would recover.
Your numbers
We’ve set conservative UK defaults. Adjust to match your business.
All inbound business calls in a typical month.
UK average across SMBs is around 25%. Some sectors run higher.
BT research cites £1,200 average for UK business calls. Adjust to your sector.
A note on these numbers.
This calculator gives you the upper-bound figure, what you’d recover if every captured call converted. In reality, your conversion rate matters too. The honest framing: HiyaCalls makes sure you never lose the call before you get the chance to convert. What you do with the captured caller from there is your sales process.
How the maths actually works.
Three numbers tell you what missed calls cost: how many calls you take, how many you miss, and what one of those calls is worth on average.
Most UK SMBs underestimate the missed-call rate, partly because they only count calls that hit voicemail, partly because callers don’t leave a message most of the time anyway. Around 85% of UK callers won’t leave a voicemail, they just hang up and ring the next business on Google. So if your phone goes unanswered, that’s usually a lost lead, not a delayed one.
The average value of a converted call depends entirely on your sector. For estate agents it’s the average value of an instruction; for dental practices it’s the lifetime value of a patient; for trades it’s the average job size. The BT-cited £1,200 average for UK business calls is a useful default, but adjust it for your business.
Multiply those three numbers and you get the cost of missed calls. Multiply by 12 and you get the annual figure. That’s the figure most businesses don’t look at, and the one that usually decides whether AI call answering is worth setting up.
Common questions
- Where do these numbers come from?
- The £1,200 default per-call value is from BT research, widely cited across the UK call answering industry. The 25% default missed-call rate is consistent with multiple UK studies on SMB call handling. Both are conservative defaults, your actual numbers may be higher or lower.
- How accurate is this for my business?
- As accurate as the inputs you provide. The maths is simple: calls per month × percentage missed × average value. The number that matters most is your own average value per missed call, for an estate agent it could be a £2,000+ instruction; for a tradesperson it might be £500.
- Would HiyaCalls really recover all of these?
- The AI answers every call, so the call gets captured. Whether that captured caller converts into business depends on the same things that have always mattered: your follow-up speed, your pricing, your service. What HiyaCalls guarantees is that you never lose the call before you get the chance.
- How much would HiyaCalls cost relative to this?
- Bespoke based on your call volume, but for context, most UK SMBs pay between £100 and £500 a month for the service. The maths typically pays back within the first month or two for any business with meaningful missed-call volume.