Free tool · Calculator
What is your unanswered phone actually costing you?
Every AI reception pitch opens with somebody else’s frightening percentage. This uses yours. Nothing you type leaves this page — there is no server behind it, and the arithmetic runs in your browser.
The short answer
Multiply your monthly enquiries by the share arriving by phone, by the share you never answer and never recover, by your conversion rate, by your revenue per converted enquiry. That is the money on the floor. Multiply again by the share a system would realistically recover — never 100% — and compare it with the quote. If it does not clear the quote comfortably, do not buy.
The third number is the one that decides everything and the one every pitch inflates. A call that rings out is not lost: a large share of those callers ring back, email instead, or were already in your pipeline under another route. Take one month, cross-reference the call log against the CRM, and count how many unanswered numbers never appear again. That count is your real number and it is usually much smaller than the slide.
The fifth number is the one nobody puts on a slide at all. No system recovers every missed enquiry. Set it to what you actually believe.
Your numbers
Opens on a worked example, not an industry average. Replace every figure with your own — there is no such thing as a default here.
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Why there are no industry defaults in this tool
Because we looked for one that survives reading, and there isn't one. The published figures for unanswered UK business calls run from around half to nearly all of them depending on who counted, what window they counted in, and what they sell. The best-documented study we found — 94.1% of calls to 3,047 UK estate and letting agency numbers going unanswered between 6pm and 9pm, from calls placed between May and July 2026 — is a three-hour evening window in a different industry, published by a company selling an out-of-hours AI answering assistant. To its credit it disclosed both the limitation and the commercial interest. It still is not your practice.
Pre-filling this calculator with any of those numbers would have made it a lead magnet with a maths costume on. Your call log is a better source than all of them.
What to do with the answer
- If the recoverable figure is small — under a few hundred pounds a month — the honest advice is to buy nothing. Record a better voicemail that promises a callback time, and spend the money on whatever is actually leaking.
- If it clears the quote comfortably, scope it to four verbs: answer, qualify, book into the real diary, hand to a named person. Not "handle enquiries".
- Either way, price it flat monthly, never per minute — otherwise your busiest month becomes your most expensive one.
- Re-run this in ninety days with the new call log. If the third number did not shrink, stop paying.
The longer method, including how to get each number out of your own systems, is in the field note this tool was built from. The pricing argument is in why per-minute pricing punishes growth.
Questions people actually ask
How much does a missed call cost a business?
There is no reliable general figure. It depends on your enquiry volume, the share arriving by phone, how many missed callers never return by any route, your conversion rate and your revenue per converted enquiry. Published figures range from about half of UK business calls unanswered to 94.1% of evening calls in one property-sector study, and every source we found was published by a company selling call answering.
Does this calculator send my numbers anywhere?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser, and there is no server behind this page to send anything to. The page does count its own views — an anonymous page count — the URL, the referrer, and a coarse country and device type, with no cookie and no identifier of any kind — and your numbers are never part of that. Open developer tools and check: one small request to this site’s own domain as the page loads, and nothing at all while you type. Turn your connection off afterwards and the calculator still works.
What is a realistic recovery rate for AI reception?
Lower than the pitch. No system answers every call, qualifies every caller correctly, or converts a recovered enquiry at the same rate as one your team handled live. Set the recovery field to what you actually believe rather than what the demo implied, then treat the result as the ceiling rather than the forecast.
Should a small brokerage buy AI reception?
Only if the recoverable revenue clears the annual cost with room, compared fairly against a part-time person. For many small firms it does not, and the correct outcome is to improve voicemail and spend the money elsewhere.
Sources
- No industry statistic is used to compute anything on this page. The arithmetic runs on numbers you supply from your own call log and CRM. — no borrowed statistics, on purpose
- InStep AI, reported by Property Industry Eye — 94.1% of calls to 3,047 UK estate and letting agency numbers unanswered between 6pm and 9pm, calls placed May–July 2026. Quoted here only as evidence that the published range is wide and vendor-supplied; not used as a default. — vendor research; commercial interest disclosed by the publisher re-checked every 6 months
Checked 8 September 2026. Next scheduled check 7 March 2027. Numbers that move — leaderboards, live indices — are re-checked every 30 days; annual datasets and rules in force every six months; dated research once a year. If something here has gone stale before we got to it, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.
If the number came out big, scope it to four verbs.
Answer, qualify, book into your real diary, hand to a named person. Flat monthly. If your number came out small, we would rather you kept the money.
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