Missed calls and small trades businesses: the numbers we can actually stand behind
Search for how many calls small businesses miss and you will find dozens of confident numbers: 62%, 74%, “85% never call back”. Most of them come from companies that sell answering services, and when we tried to trace them to an original source, most could not be traced. We sell a phone answering system too, so we held ourselves to a simple rule for this page: every number below links to where it came from, and we say what it does and does not prove.
How many small trades businesses are there?
Statistics Canada counts businesses by industry. The group that includes electrical, plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors is called building equipment contractors. In 2025 it had:
- 4,530 employer establishments in Alberta, out of 34,695 across Canada.
- Nationally, 57.8% of those employer establishments had fewer than five employees.
What this tells you: most of the businesses in this group are very small, which usually means the owner is also the person doing the work, and the person who can’t answer the phone while doing it.
What it doesn’t tell you: it doesn’t break out electricians or plumbers on their own, the 57.8% is a national figure rather than an Alberta one, and it counts only businesses with employees, so it leaves out solo operators. It says nothing about missed calls.
What share of calls goes unanswered?
CallRail, which sells call-tracking software, says that on average 28% of inbound calls go unanswered, based on its own data. Source: CallRail, June 2026.
What this tells you: across a large number of businesses that track their calls, a meaningful share of calls is not picked up.
What it doesn’t tell you: the post gives no time period, no sample size and no method, and the figure covers all industries, not trades. Businesses that pay for call tracking may also not look like yours. Treat it as a rough marker, not a benchmark for your business.
What do callers do when they reach voicemail?
In 2016 the answering company Moneypenny reported that 69% of callers who reached voicemail hung up without leaving a message. It was based on a survey of 300 micro businesses and an analysis of call data from 10,000 businesses. Source: Moneypenny, November 2016.
What this tells you: a voicemail box often captures far fewer enquiries than it seems to, because most people simply hang up.
What it doesn’t tell you: it is ten years old, the report doesn’t explain how the 69% was calculated, and it doesn’t say what those callers did next. In particular, it does not show that they called a competitor.
Numbers we left out
You will see higher figures elsewhere, such as the share of callers who supposedly go straight to a competitor, or the share who never call back. We left them out because we could not find the original study behind them. Some of them appear to be passed from one vendor blog to another with no source at the bottom. We also could not find a published, reliable miss rate for trades businesses in Alberta.
The only number that really matters is yours
Because the public data is thin, the most useful figure for your business is your own. You can get it two ways:
- Count. Open your call log and tally the missed and unanswered incoming calls for a normal week. Note which ones you never returned.
- Estimate the cost. Enter your own numbers into our missed call calculator. It uses only what you type in, and it works in rough monthly and yearly figures, so you can be as cautious as you like with the percentages.
When we run a free 30-day pilot with a new customer, the results report shows the real numbers for that business: how many calls came in, how many were answered by the system, and how many arrived outside business hours. Once customers agree, we plan to publish what we see in anonymized form, instead of relying on someone else’s statistics.
Never lose a call to voicemail again.
DialFrontDesk answers the calls you miss, texts the customer back and puts the job in your dashboard. Try it free for 30 days.
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