Missed-call rate

Missed-call rate is the share of calls to a business in a given period that ended without being answered by a person or a system, out of all inbound calls in that period. The calculation is simple: divide the number of missed calls by the total number of inbound calls over the same period. You can track it by day, by week or by time of day; looking at peak hours and after-hours separately is often the most revealing.

How it works

"Missed" is not a single outcome. Calls that rang out unanswered, calls that hit a busy signal because the line or its channels were full, and calls where the caller hung up while waiting in the queue (abandoned calls) point to different causes. Unanswered calls reflect staffing or business hours, busy signals reflect line capacity and the concurrent call limit, and abandoned calls reflect waiting times. Counting calls that hang up within a few seconds separately keeps the rate from being inflated.

Why it matters

Every missed call may be a customer trying to reach you, an appointment or a sale, and some callers never try again. Ways to bring the rate down include callbacks, forwarding on busy and no answer, and letting a voice agent handle routine calls. You can estimate the impact with your own numbers using the missed-call cost calculator, and read more in The Cost of Missed Calls and Automatic Callbacks.