What a missed customer inquiry costs an HVAC company.

The math

Four numbers are enough. You know all of them better than anyone.

1. Missed or late inquiries per week. Calls, texts and web messages that went unanswered, or that you answered after the customer had moved on.
2. Share that were real jobs. Leave out wrong numbers, spam and people only asking a general question.
3. Share you would have won if you had answered quickly.
4. Average value of a job to you.

Multiply all four. That is the work you lost in a week. Multiply by 52 for a year.

Try your numbers

The boxes start with made-up example numbers. Replace them with yours.

An example with made-up numbers

Say five inquiries a week slip by. Three of them (60%) are real jobs. You would have won two of those three (about 40% of the five). At $400 a job, that is 5 x 0.6 x 0.4 x $400 = $480 a week, or about $24,960 a year. These numbers are an illustration only. Your own may be far lower or higher.

Where inquiries slip

• Evenings and weekends, when no one is at the desk.
• While you are on a job and cannot pick up the phone.
• A web form or text message that is read the next morning.
• Hot or cold snaps, when everyone is calling at once.

Ways to catch more of them

1. Call back fast. Returning a missed call within the hour, with a short script, costs nothing.
2. Offer a text option in your voicemail greeting, so people can write instead of waiting.
3. An answering service or text-back tool handles calls, for a monthly fee.
4. An assistant on your website. This is what we are building at Lyrascent. It answers website visitors any hour, takes their details and sends each request to you. It chats on your website. It does not answer phone calls, and it never quotes prices or gives safety advice beyond telling people to call 911.

No tool wins every job. The point of the math is to see how much a better first reply is worth to you before you spend anything.