How to measure missed calls.
Most phone systems log the calls nobody answered. Few offices read the report. Before paying for an answering service, an AI agent or another receptionist, spend two weeks finding out how many calls you miss, when, and what happens to them.
Three numbers that get confused.
- Missed. The phone rang and nobody picked up: it went to voicemail, rang out, or hit a busy signal. Your phone system logs each one.
- Abandoned. The caller reached a queue or an auto-attendant and hung up before a person answered. Logged separately, usually with the wait time.
- After hours. Calls that arrived when nobody was there to answer. Some systems count these as missed, some as voicemail, some not at all.
Add the three to get the calls that did not reach a person. Price that number.
Where the data is.
| Number | Where it lives | What to export |
|---|---|---|
| Calls offered, answered, missed | Phone system call log or analytics | Every inbound call for two weeks: time, duration, outcome, line |
| Abandoned, and wait before abandoning | Queue or auto-attendant report | Abandon count by hour; average and longest wait |
| Voicemails left, and returned | Voicemail log, plus whoever returns them | Count left, count returned, hours to return |
| Calls that became appointments or matters | EHR, case management or CRM | New bookings in the same two weeks, by source if tracked |
| Marketing calls missed | Call tracking, if you have it | Missed rate on tracked numbers |
If your phone system cannot export a call log, fix that first.
A two-week audit.
- Export the call log for ten working days. Include evenings and weekends.
- Count calls that did not reach a person: missed, abandoned, after hours. Divide by calls offered. That is your missed-call rate.
- Break it down by hour. Lunch and the first hour of the day will stand out, and so will everything after closing.
- Count voicemails left and voicemails returned, and how long the return took. The gap is callers who left a message and never heard back.
- Pick twenty missed calls at random and call them back, or look them up. New patient? Existing? Vendor? Price the share that was new business.
- Put the rate, the after-hours share and the new-business share into the calculator for your industry: medical, law, field services.
The secret-shopper test.
Clio phoned 500 law firms as a prospective client and found about 40% answered live. A 1,200-call audit of smaller firms, placed between 10am and 4pm, found 34.8% unanswered. You can run the same test on yourself in an afternoon: ten calls from a number the office does not know, spread across the day and one after closing, by someone who will write down what happened. Count answered live, answered by machine, and not answered. Then do it again from your website’s form.
What good looks like.
There is no independent benchmark for a small business phone. The figures that exist are platform data from companies selling the fix. CallRail’s 1.1 million tracked leads: 32% missed in healthcare, 28% in legal, 14% in home services, marketing calls only. Patient Prism’s 11.5 million dental calls: 31 in 100 hung up before reaching anyone. AnswerConnect’s 5.9 million minutes: 47% of calls outside working hours, among businesses that already pay for after-hours answering. Vendor pages put an acceptable healthcare call-center abandonment rate at 5% to 8% and the classic answer target at 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
Use them to sanity-check your own audit. Set your target on the share of new-business calls that reached a person, and aim for close to all of them.
Sources.
- Missed-call rate by industry, 1.1 million tracked leads. CallRail, via Plumber Magazine, 2025. Call-tracking platform data, January 2025: healthcare 32% of leads missed, legal 28%, home services 14%, real estate 9%. Lead-level, marketing-generated calls only, so it understates total call volume and overstates how many were new business. Source
- Dental Patient Access Report. Patient Prism, 2025. 11,552,668 calls to 8,280 dental locations on the vendor's platform in 2025. Per 100 calls: 31 hung up before reaching anyone, 34 were real booking opportunities, 21 booked, 13 walked away, 4.8 got a follow-up call and 0.7 of those came back. Dental, not medical, and one vendor's customers. Source
- 47% of business calls occur after hours. AnswerConnect, 2026. US call logs, 5,906,476 minutes, April to June 2026: 47% of calls arrived outside Monday to Friday working hours or on weekends, across all industries. An answering service's own customers, who skew toward businesses that already get after-hours calls, so the defaults here sit well below 47%. Source
- Legal Trends Report, secret-shopper study. Clio, via the American Bar Association, 2024. 500 US firms phoned as prospective clients: about 40% answered live, down from 56% in 2019; about 52% made contact once callbacks are counted. Source
- 1,200 calls to small and mid-sized law firms. Law Leaders / LegalNavigator, 2025. Calls placed 10am to 4pm on business days over four weeks: 34.8% unanswered. Run by a vendor of AI intake, with no per-call data published. Source
- Healthcare call abandonment rate benchmarks. Patient Prism and other vendor pages, 2026. Vendor pages put healthcare call-center abandonment around 7%, treat 5% to 8% as acceptable and under 5% as the target, and say physician offices often run 10% to 20% at peak. The classic contact-center answer target is 80% of calls within 20 seconds. No primary benchmark study exists for medical practice phones. Source
- Voice agent at a mental health practice. JRW case study, 2026. Booking rate for answered new-patient calls rose from 33% to 58% over six weeks at a practice with over 100 providers. One engagement. Liine's 54% across 325,000 inquiries and Patient Prism's 62% of real opportunities sit either side of it. Source
Questions.
- Our phone system shows a missed rate of 10%. Is that bad?
- It depends what it counts. If after-hours calls and abandoned queue calls are excluded, the real figure is higher. Add the three before judging it. Then ask what share of the missed calls were new business; that is what the rate costs.
- Do voicemails count as missed?
- Yes. Many callers with a new need do not leave one, and many who do don’t get a call back the same day. Count voicemails left and returned separately so you can see both losses.
- How long should the audit run?
- Two weeks catches the weekly pattern. Run it again after any change, with the same export, so you compare like with like.
Run the audit, then bring it to us.
Send the two weeks of call data, or we’ll help you pull it, and we’ll show you which of those calls a voice agent would answer. Fixed price per automation. If the first one misses the scope we agreed, you don’t pay.
Book a call (opens in a new tab)Related: What it costs to answer the phone · Missed call statistics · Missed calls, medical practice · Voice intake case study