$300k a year recovered - with missed calls down from 41% to 3%

RESULTS

Measured over the 90 days either side of launch.

$25,400 a month recovered
Over $300,000 a year of booked work, from the same inbound volume and the same marketing spend.
Missed after-hours calls: 41% -> 3%
The remainder are callers who hung up inside two rings.
81% handled end to end
Resolved or booked with no human paged at any point.
Cost per conversation: $6.10 -> $0.94
While the share ending in a booking rose from 12% to 47%. It costs less than the answering service and books four times as often.
First response on tickets: 6 hours -> 11 minutes
73% of email, SMS and chat arrive already triaged, routed and drafted.

The problem

The marketing was working. The phone was the leak.

The busiest hours were the unstaffed ones
36% of calls arrived outside office hours, and 41% of those were never answered.
Voicemail is not a safety net
Fewer than one caller in five rang back the next day. A burst pipe does not wait for opening time - it calls the next number on the list.
The answering service made it worse, expensively
$6.10 a call to take a message, with 12% of those messages turning into work.

What we shipped

One agent across every channel, with limits it will not cross.

One agent across voice, SMS, web chat and email
Answering in under two rings, at any hour.
Safety-first triage
Isolation steps before any talk of booking.
Real calendar integration
It books an actual slot with the right trade, never an invented one.
Hard stops it will not cross
Gas and CO always end in evacuate-and-call, never a booking. Nothing over $2,000 is priced on the phone.
Escalation to the on-call engineer
When a caller is distressed or the situation is ambiguous. Roughly one call in eleven, which is the design rather than a failure rate.

Six months from first call to go-live. The engagement is ongoing - we continue to work with the team as new branches and trades come on.

Four in ten calls arriving after 6pm went unanswered - an overnight voicemail that returned fewer than one caller in five the next morning. We built a voice-led agent that answers every channel in under two rings, triages for safety, books against the real calendar and pages the on-call engineer only when it should. It now recovers $25,400 of booked work a month from calls the business was already paying to generate.