Answering the phone with both hands full

It's twenty to eleven. You're up a ladder with a board under one arm and a drill in the other hand, and the phone goes in your pocket. You can't take it. Nobody could take it. By the time you're down, washed up and sat in the van, it's ten past one and there are two missed calls and a voicemail you'll listen to later.

That's not bad business. That's the job. The trouble isn't that you missed the call, it's what happens in the three hours afterwards.

What the caller does next

They don't wait. They've got a leak, or a dead socket, or a kitchen they want quoted before their sister comes at the weekend, and your name was one of four they found. When you don't pick up, they ring the next one. If that one answers, you're already out, and you'll never know it happened. There's no notification for a job you didn't get.

It isn't personal and it isn't a reflection on your work. Somebody with a problem rings until somebody picks up.

Leon ran his phone on silent from eight in the morning, because you can't work with it going off in your pocket. He'd pick it up at the end of the day and there'd be three or four hours of replying to do, usually on a Saturday, because that was the first clear stretch. A conversation that would've taken five minutes on the phone turned into twenty messages spread over two days.

Why voicemail doesn't save it

Most people won't leave one. They'll hang up and try the next number, and the ones who do leave a message often leave a name and nothing else, so you ring back into the same problem from the other side. Now you're the one chasing, and they're at work, or driving, or they've already booked somebody.

Voicemail tells the caller you weren't there. It doesn't answer their question and it doesn't put anything in the diary, which are the only two things they actually wanted.

The four things that decide whether they come back

Whether a missed call turns into a job comes down to four things, in this order.

• Speed. Not how fast you can get to site. How fast something reaches them after the phone stops ringing. Minutes matter here, hours don't exist.
• Whether it sounds like your firm. A generic auto-reply reads like the number's dead. Their name, your business name, and a sentence that sounds like a person is a different thing entirely.
• Whether their question got answered. Most first calls are one question. Do you cover my area, do you do this kind of work, roughly what does it cost, when could you come. Answer it and the conversation carries on.
• Whether anything got booked. A reply that ends with a time and a date closes the loop. One that ends with "we'll be in touch" hands the job back to whoever answers next.

Four things worth checking this week

None of this needs anything bought. Do it from your own phone, sat in the van.

• Ring your own number from a mate's phone and don't answer it. Time how long it takes for anything at all to come back. If the answer is nothing, that's your number.
• Read your voicemail greeting out loud. If it's the network default, the caller doesn't know they've got the right firm.
• Count last week's missed calls in your phone log. Not to feel bad about it, just to know the size of it. Most people guess low.
• Pick three of them and ring back. Ask plainly whether they got it sorted elsewhere. The answer tells you what a missed call actually costs you, in your own numbers rather than anybody else's.

What we do about it

Cobalt answers the calls you can't. It picks up in your business's name, answers the questions people ask most often from one approved set of answers, takes the name and the reason for calling, and books the appointment while they're still on the phone. If it doesn't know something it says so, and it puts the call through to you when it should.

If the call goes unanswered anyway, a text lands with them inside a few seconds, so the person who rang at twenty to eleven has something from you before they've dialled the next name.

You can ring it yourself on 07401 200177 and ask it whatever you like. It's the same thing a customer would get, not a demo version. If you'd rather see it alongside the rest of the system, there's a fifteen minute run through, and the two plans are priced in public.