What happens to the calls you miss?

Why does voicemail lose you customers?

Voicemail loses you customers because most callers will not use it. When a call goes unanswered, the majority hang up and try the next business on their list rather than leave a message they doubt anyone will hear. A missed call is rarely a caller who will patiently wait. It is someone with a burst pipe, a toothache, or a job to book, and they are calling three businesses in a row. The first one to answer wins the work. Voicemail asks that person to stop, listen to a greeting, and record themselves, and most simply will not. The message you never get is the booking you never made. Missed-call answering removes that gap: the call is answered by a real voice every time, so the caller talks to your business instead of dialling a competitor.

80% of callers sent to voicemail do not leave a message. Source: Forbes, 2014

How does missed-call divert work on your existing number?

It works with a standard divert-on-no-answer, the same setting your phone provider already offers. You keep your number exactly as it is. You tell your provider to forward calls to Kalvo when you do not pick up within a set number of rings, usually four, and that is the whole setup. There is no porting, no new number to advertise, and no new hardware. Your phone rings as normal, and you answer the calls you can. When you cannot, after those few rings, the call passes to Kalvo instead of voicemail. Most providers let you set this in a couple of minutes from your account or by dialling a short code. Because it is a divert and not a replacement, you can turn it off or change the ring count whenever you like, and nothing about how you make outbound calls changes.

What does Kalvo do on the call?

Kalvo answers in your business name, listens, and handles the enquiry the way a good receptionist would. It answers questions from your knowledge base, checks what the caller needs, and books the appointment or captures the job then and there. If the caller wants a time, Kalvo offers real options and confirms one. If they have a question about price, hours, or location, it answers from what you have told it. If they need something it cannot resolve, it takes their details and the reason for the call so you can follow up with the full picture. When a caller describes a genuine emergency and you have set that up, Kalvo can transfer them straight to a person, whatever the time. Every caller gets an unhurried conversation, and several callers can be handled at once, so no one waits on hold or hears a busy tone.

What do you see afterwards?

After every call you get a clear record: a short summary of what the caller wanted, the full transcript, any booking that was made, and the caller’s details for a callback. It arrives in your inbox and, if you want, as a notification, so nothing sits unnoticed. You stay in control of how much Kalvo does on its own. Run it fully automatic, where it books and replies without you, or in approval mode, where it drafts the follow-up and waits for your one-tap approval before anything goes out. Urgent items, like a missed call flagged as an emergency or a caller who asked for a callback, are marked so you see them first. The result is that a call you could not take still becomes something you can act on in seconds, rather than a voicemail you find hours later.

What does it cost compared to a missed job?

Kalvo starts at £49 a month for 100 call minutes, with larger plans at £99 and £199. Set against the value of the work a missed call represents, the maths is straightforward: one recovered job a month usually covers the plan several times over. Think about a single missed call in your trade and what that booking is worth, then multiply by how many calls go unanswered in a busy week. For most small businesses the cost of missed calls dwarfs the cost of answering them. Kalvo is a flat monthly price with no per-call charge inside your plan, so the more calls it saves, the better the return. You are not paying for a call centre or another salary. You are paying a fixed fee to make sure the phone is always answered, and keeping the jobs that used to slip away.

£1,200 the estimated cost of a single missed customer call. Source: BT Business research, 2014