You probably know roughly how many calls your office answers. The number it didn't answer is harder to pin down, because unanswered calls don't show up anywhere unless you go looking: a caller who hangs up after four rings leaves no message, and a missed call from an unfamiliar number looks like spam when you scroll past it.
This is an audit you can do in an afternoon with the call records you already have. It covers what to count, where to get the numbers, how to sort them in a spreadsheet, and what to fix first.
What to count
Pick two to four ordinary weeks. Avoid a holiday week unless that's your busy season, in which case audit that too.
- Total inbound calls.
- Answered calls, meaning a person picked up.
- Missed and abandoned calls: the call rang out, or the caller hung up before anyone answered, including while on hold.
- Calls that went to voicemail, and how many of those left a message. The difference is the people who heard the beep and hung up.
- After-hours calls: anything that arrived outside your posted hours, whether or not anyone could have answered.
- Repeat callers: the same number calling two or more times in a day. Often that's someone who didn't get through the first time.
If your system has hold queues, add the average wait and the longest wait. And pull one number from your own habits: how long it takes, on average, to return a voicemail.
Where to get the numbers
Hosted phone systems, the VoIP kind you manage in a web portal, usually have a call log or call history report that you can export as a CSV file. If you use hold queues or ring groups, look for the queue report too. It's where abandoned calls and wait times tend to live. Search your provider's help pages for "call history export."
For mobile phones, the carrier's online account usually shows incoming calls in the usage details. The phone's own recent-calls list shows missed calls, but only for that one phone and only so far back.
Traditional landline bills may list only the calls you made, not the ones you received. Ask the carrier whether it can provide an incoming call report.
If none of that works, keep a tally sheet by the phone for two weeks: the time, answered or not, and what it was about. It's crude, and it still tells you more than guessing.
Whatever the source, add a few test calls. Call your own number from a cell phone at 12:15, at 4:55 and at 5:10 on a weekday, and once on Saturday morning. Count the rings, and listen to what a caller hears. A full voicemail box or a greeting that still gives last season's hours is worth finding today.
Sorting it in a spreadsheet
Open the export in Google Sheets or Excel. Say the date is in column A, the time in column B, the caller's number in column C and the result (answered, missed, voicemail) in column D. Add four helper columns:
- Hour of the call:
=HOUR(B2) - Day of the week:
=TEXT(A2,"ddd") - After hours or not:
=IF(OR(WEEKDAY(A2,2)>5,HOUR(B2)<8,HOUR(B2)>=17),"after hours","open"), changing 8 and 17 to your opening and closing hours - Calls from the same number that day:
=COUNTIFS(C:C,C2,A:A,A2)
Fill them down, then build a pivot table with the hour (or the day) as rows, the result as columns and a count of calls as the values.
Two things trip people up. If the export puts date and time in one column, HOUR, WEEKDAY and TEXT still work when you point them at that column; for the same-day count, add a column with =INT(A2) to strip off the time and count on that instead. And check the time zone: some systems export timestamps in UTC, which shifts every call by several hours and makes your mornings look like evenings.
Now read the pivot table for four answers:
- When do unanswered calls happen? Look for clusters: first thing in the morning, lunch, the last half hour, the hour after close.
- What share of all calls arrive after hours?
- Of the calls that went to voicemail, how many left a message?
- How many numbers called once, went unanswered and never called back? Those are the callers most likely to have tried someone else.
What to fix first
Put your effort where the most unanswered calls are. Before that, do the free fixes, today. Empty the voicemail box, update the greeting, and lengthen the ring time before voicemail if it's short. If you have a phone menu, call it yourself and see whether every option leads somewhere.
If unanswered calls cluster at the same daytime hours, it's a coverage problem at those hours. Stagger lunches, add a second line that rings when the first is busy, or forward unanswered calls elsewhere. Conditional forwarding, which your carrier turns on with a short dial code, sends only the calls nobody picks up to another number, such as an answering service or an AI receptionist.
If a large share of calls arrive after hours, a morning callback only works for the people who left a message. Decide whether those calls need answering live. We go through the options in what to do about after-hours calls.
If repeat callers keep asking the same thing ("did you get my documents?", "are you open Saturday?"), answer it before they call. Put it on your website, send a confirmation text, or say it in the voicemail greeting. Better still, have whoever answers the phone, person or AI, able to answer it on the first call.
If hold times are long, look at who is answering. One person covering both the phone and the front counter will keep someone waiting. Either change the staffing at the busy hours or take the routine questions off that person's plate.
Making the next audit easier
Once calls run through ModPhone, every call appears in call history with its status (completed, transferred, missed or voicemail), a transcript and a summary, and the dashboard counts calls for today and for the month. Calls that need a person to follow up land on a Needs attention list instead of in someone's memory. The next audit becomes a matter of reading a report instead of building one.
Common questions
How do I find out how many calls my business misses?
Export two to four weeks of call records from your phone system or carrier, then count the calls that rang out, were abandoned or went to voicemail. Compare those with total inbound calls, and sort by hour of day to see when the misses happen. If you can't get records, keep a tally sheet by the phone for two weeks.
What is an abandoned call?
An abandoned call is one where the caller hangs up before anyone answers, either while it's ringing or while they're on hold. Because the caller is gone before voicemail picks up, abandoned calls only show up in call logs and queue reports.
Can I track missed calls without a phone system report?
Yes. Keep a paper tally by the phone for two weeks, noting the time, whether it was answered and what the caller wanted, and make test calls to your own number at the busiest and quietest times of day. Your mobile carrier's online account may also list incoming calls.
What should I fix first to stop missing calls?
Fix the free things first: a full voicemail box, an outdated greeting and a ring time that's too short. Then put your effort where the unanswered calls cluster, whether that's lunch hour, the opening rush or after close.
Where to start
Pull last month's call log this week and build the hourly pivot table. If most of the unanswered calls fall in one window, you know what to fix. To hear what an AI receptionist would say to those callers, try the demo on your own website.