Ask an owner how the office handles calls and the answer is usually “pretty well”. On a normal Tuesday morning, that is often true.
The trouble is that a Tuesday morning is not where calls go wrong. They go wrong at lunch, on Friday afternoon, during a heat wave, after five, and on the Saturday nobody wanted to cover. The office cannot see those calls because, by definition, nobody was there for them.
A scorecard is a way to look at the whole week instead of the good part of it. The ten questions below cover what happens from the first ring to the booked job. Each one has a description of what good looks like and a way to check it from records you already have, rather than from memory.
How to use it
Score each question 0, 1 or 2:
- 2: you can show it from records, and it holds at every hour you take calls.
- 1: it is mostly true, or true during office hours only, or you believe it but have not checked.
- 0: it is not true, or you have no way of knowing.
“I think so” is a 1. The point of the exercise is to replace impressions with something you can look at. Take one recent month, pull the reports, and score honestly. Nobody else needs to see the result.
The scorecard
| # | Question | What good looks like | How to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Does every inbound call reach a person or a real conversation, at every hour you advertise? | Answer rate is similar in and out of office hours; no window where calls pile into voicemail | Phone system call log, answered vs. missed, split by hour of day and day of week |
| 2 | Is the missed-call report reviewed every week? | A named person looks at it weekly and acts on it | Ask who opened it last and when |
| 3 | Are missed calls called back quickly? | Missed callers get a call back within minutes during the day, and first thing the next morning at the latest | Match missed calls to outbound calls to the same number in the log |
| 4 | How long does the phone ring before it is picked up? | Most calls answered within a few rings; few callers hang up while it is still ringing | Ring time and abandoned calls in the phone system, if it records them |
| 5 | Does the person answering capture what dispatch needs, every time? | Name, callback number, address, the problem, urgency and how they found you, in the same order on every call | Pull ten recent call notes or job records and check which fields are filled in |
| 6 | Can the person answering book the job on the call? | Access to the schedule and authority to offer a slot, without “someone will call you back” | Listen to recorded calls, or ask how many calls end with a booked time |
| 7 | Does the after-hours response do more than take a message? | Emergencies are sorted from routine requests, the caller hears a specific next step, and on-call staff are reached quickly | Call your own line after hours, twice: once as an emergency, once as a routine request |
| 8 | Is there a plan for spikes? | Heat waves, storms and campaign launches have a known overflow: a second person, a service, a system | Look at the busiest day of the last season and compare the answer rate with a normal day |
| 9 | Is every call tied to a source and an outcome? | Each call can be traced to a campaign or listing, and to booked, quoted, or not booked | Pick five booked jobs from last month and try to name the source of each |
| 10 | Does anyone listen to calls? | A handful of recordings reviewed each week, with feedback to the person who took them | Ask when a recording was last played and what changed afterward |
What the score means
Add it up out of 20. There is no official benchmark for this and we would be wary of anyone who claims one. The score is useful as a before-and-after for your own shop, and for pointing at where to start.
- 16 to 20: the process is working. Keep checking it each quarter, especially going into the busy season.
- 10 to 15: daytime is handled; the edges are not. Look at which questions scored 0; they tend to cluster around after-hours and missed calls.
- Under 10: the office is probably doing its best with no visibility. Start with questions 1 and 2. You cannot fix what nobody is looking at.
The questions are not equally weighted in practice. Questions 1, 3 and 7 are where unanswered demand sits, and demand you already paid to create. Question 9 is what lets you tell whether any of it matters in dollars.
The questions owners argue with
“We don’t need to answer at 9 p.m., nobody calls then.” Maybe. Question 1 asks you to check rather than assume. If the log shows no calls after hours, you have lost nothing by looking. If it shows a steady trickle that went to voicemail, you have found something. We wrote about what happens to those callers in voicemail after five.
“Our people call back fast.” Question 3 tests it. Callbacks are often fast when someone is at the desk and slow when they are not, and the average hides the difference. Split it by hour. The reasoning for caring about minutes rather than hours is in the five-minute window.
“We don’t record calls.” Then question 10 is a 0, and that is fine to start with. Recording has consent rules: California generally requires telling every party a call may be recorded, which is why so many systems play a notice at the start. Check your system’s settings and the current rules before turning it on.
“Tracking is the agency’s job.” Question 9 asks whether you can say where last month’s jobs came from, not who set up the tracking.
After scoring
Pick the two lowest-scoring questions and fix one thing for each in the next month. Not ten things. For example, if question 2 scored 0, the fix is a recurring fifteen-minute slot on someone’s calendar every Monday to open the missed-call report. If question 7 scored 0, the fix starts with calling your own after-hours line and listening to what a customer hears.
Then score again in a month, with the same records, and see what moved.
If you want to put a rough figure on the calls that scored badly, the revenue leak calculator works from your own call counts, and it reports the result as revenue at stake, not revenue lost, because nobody can know how many of those callers would have booked.