Nobody knows how many calls your office missed last week

It is twenty to twelve on a Tuesday. Your office manager has the supplier on one line and two people standing at the counter, and the phone starts ringing again. Four rings, then the recording. The woman calling hangs up before it finishes.

She does not leave a message, and she does not try again after lunch. She had three names on a pad, she is on the second one now, and somebody over there picked up on the second ring. Nothing about that appears anywhere in your day.

How many, and at what hour

A jam at the front desk announces itself. A call that rang out at twenty to twelve does not, so most owners guess low. The number does exist, though: whoever sends you the phone bill can also send you a record of last month’s calls, answered and unanswered, with the time on each one.

Ask for it in writing, then read it with the person who actually answers the phone. She will see the pattern before you do, because she was on the other line for most of it. Four things are worth marking:

• The hour when calls came in and nobody picked up. In most offices it is one hour, and it is usually the middle of the day.
• How many arrived before you opened, after you closed, or over the weekend.
• Whether a number tried twice, which tells you somebody was determined, or once, which tells you she was not.
• How much of it was not a customer at all — your own people, the same supplier twice a week, somebody selling something. Not every unanswered call cost you anything.

Two offices with the same total have different problems. One of them is a pair of hands short between noon and one. The other is closed at the only time its customers are free to call, which is a different question with a different answer. It is worth knowing which one you are before you buy anything.

Nobody leaves a message any more

Your customers stopped leaving messages years ago and never mentioned it. It is not rudeness. The woman calling has two more names in front of her, and a message means waiting an unknown number of hours for a call she cannot plan around. Around here she has four more of you within fifteen minutes of her kitchen.

And the firms that do call back get caught by the other half. You return the message at two, from a number she does not recognize, and she lets it ring. Keep a greeting if you like, but treat it as a floor rather than a plan: name the hour somebody will call back, and then call then.

The fixes, cheapest first

Start with the hour you found. Somebody covers the phone from noon to one, on a rota written where everyone can see it, and that costs nothing. Have the calls ring at a second desk before the recording takes over, too — somebody changes that in an afternoon, and in plenty of offices it is most of the problem.

For evenings and weekends, forwarding to a person who has agreed to carry it works, on one condition. Write down what counts as urgent enough to ring somebody at nine at night. Otherwise whoever is holding the phone decides that alone, every time, and it wears out inside a month.

Above that sits a service where a person answers in your firm’s name, takes the details and sends them straight over. Before you sign anything, ask what your caller hears in the first six seconds, how fast the message reaches somebody who can act on it, and whether whoever answers can see your schedule or only take a note.

Above that sits the clever one — an assistant that answers by itself and books the visit. For a trade whose evening callers all want the same three things, that genuinely works. Where the caller may be upset, or her first sentence is already a legal question, we have talked owners out of it. Before you believe a demonstration, call your own number and try to confuse it.

Most of the offices we walk into are in better shape here than the owner fears. The damage is usually one hour on a weekday and a handful of evenings, and neither needs anything clever bought for it. If you would rather somebody else pulled the record and sat down with it, a review is ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.