October 1, 2026 · Ken Gaffga, Founder
74% of Calls Go Unanswered. A New Study Put a Number on What That's Costing You
We've talked about missed calls in this series before as the single biggest, most repeated theme in trades AI right now. A study released this fall put a harder number on it than anything we'd seen: across 130,175 calls to 45 HVAC and trades contractors, 74% went unanswered.
Three Out of Four Callers Just Call the Next Shop
Read that stat the way a homeowner actually behaves, not the way a business owner hopes they behave. Nobody sits on hold. When the AC dies on a Tuesday afternoon or a pipe bursts on a Saturday morning, the caller Googles "HVAC near me," calls the first three results, and books with whoever answers first — human or not. If your business is one of the 74%, you're not losing the job to a better competitor. You're losing it to whoever picked up.
This is worth sitting with, because it cuts against how most owners think about competition. It's easy to assume you're losing jobs on price, or reputation, or drive time. The data says the much simpler, much more fixable problem — somebody didn't pick up the phone — is doing more damage than most owners realize.
Why This Number Is Bigger Than "After Hours"
The instinct is to assume this is mostly a nights-and-weekends problem. It isn't, entirely. A meaningful share of these misses happen during business hours — a tech on a call, a front-office person handling three things at once, a call that rings through to voicemail because nobody was free in that exact 90 seconds. The after-hours gap is real and well-documented, but the daytime version of this problem is the one most owners haven't measured at all.
That's the actual value of a stat like this: not the specific number, but the invitation to go measure your own. Most trades businesses have never pulled their own missed-call rate. It's sitting in the phone system or CRM already, unexamined.
What to Do With This This Week
Before buying anything — an AI receptionist, a new phone system, a platform upgrade — pull your own numbers. How many inbound calls did your business get last month, and how many were actually answered live? That single number tells you whether you have a missed-call problem worth solving with AI, or whether your real leak is somewhere else entirely (a theme we'll come back to in a later post). Fixing a problem you don't actually have wastes money faster than the problem itself.
Source: 130,175-call study cited by Cal Hamilton, AI advisory practitioner, via LinkedIn. Underlying methodology not independently published — treat the figure as a directional industry signal, not an audited statistic, and verify your own numbers before acting on it.