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Missed Enquiry Cost Calculator
Work out what unanswered out-of-hours enquiries cost you each month, from your own numbers.
In short
The Missed Enquiry Cost Calculator estimates what unanswered enquiries cost a business each month. You enter monthly visitors, the share who enquire, your average order value and how many enquiries go unanswered or arrive out of hours; it returns the monthly and annual revenue at stake and what recovering part of it would be worth. It runs in your browser and needs no signup.
Your numbers
From your analytics — sessions or users, either is fine.
Enquiries divided by visitors. For most service businesses this is 1-3%.
Count a month of enquiries and how many landed outside staffed hours. This is the input worth measuring rather than guessing.
Of the enquiries you do answer, the share that buy.
Revenue per customer. Use lifetime value if you have repeat business.
Not all of it. Some of those people come back anyway, and some were never buyers.
Revenue at stake
£3,500
a month · £42,000 a year
Realistically recoverable
£1,750
a month · £21,000 a year, at 50% recovery
- Enquiries a month
- 100
- Unanswered or out of hours
- 35
- Customers those would have become
- 8.8
This is revenue at stake, not revenue guaranteed. Weigh the recoverable figure against what answering those enquiries would actually cost — if it comes to less, the honest answer is to do nothing.
How much revenue do businesses lose to unanswered enquiries?
It depends entirely on traffic and order value, which is why a calculator beats a statistic. The arithmetic is simple: monthly visitors multiplied by your enquiry rate gives enquiries; the share arriving outside working hours or going unanswered, multiplied by the rate at which enquiries become customers and by your average order value, gives the revenue at stake. For most small businesses the number is larger than expected, because it compounds monthly.
The cost you cannot see in your analytics
Every business tracks the enquiries it receives. Almost none track the ones that were never made — the visitor who wanted to ask about availability at 10pm, found a contact form, and closed the tab. That visit is recorded as a session with no conversion, indistinguishable from someone who was browsing idly.
This is what makes the loss so easy to underestimate. There is no queue of missed enquiries to look at, no alert, no bounced email. The only trace is a conversion rate slightly lower than it could be, which looks like a normal number until you work out what sits behind it.
How the estimate is calculated
The model is deliberately transparent, so you can check it against your own figures rather than trust a black box. Monthly visitors multiplied by the enquiry rate gives total monthly enquiries. Multiplying by the share that go unanswered or arrive out of hours gives the enquiries at risk. Multiplying those by the rate at which an enquiry becomes a paying customer, and then by average order value, gives the monthly revenue at stake.
The recovery rate is the honest part. Not every missed enquiry can be won back by answering faster — some of those people would have returned anyway, and some were never buyers. Setting recovery to a realistic fraction gives you a figure you can defend rather than a headline number you cannot.
- Enquiries = visitors × enquiry rate
- At risk = enquiries × share unanswered or out of hours
- Revenue at stake = at risk × close rate × average order value
- Recoverable = revenue at stake × recovery rate
What to do with the number
The first use is comparison. Whatever the recoverable figure comes to, weigh it against what answering those enquiries would cost — an out-of-hours answering service, extending staffed hours, or software that answers automatically. If the recoverable amount is smaller than the cost, the honest conclusion is to do nothing, and a calculator that never produces that answer is a sales page.
The second use is measurement. Before changing anything, count a month of enquiries and note how many arrived outside the hours someone was available. That single count replaces the biggest assumption in the model and usually shifts the result more than any other input.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the default numbers come from?
They are illustrative starting points, not benchmarks, and you should replace every one with your own. Your analytics has the visitor count, your inbox has the enquiry count, and your accounts have the average order value. A calculator built on someone else's averages tells you about someone else's business.
Is 'lost revenue' the same as revenue I would definitely have earned?
No. It is revenue at stake, not revenue guaranteed. Some people who do not get an instant answer come back later, and some were never going to buy. Treat the figure as the size of the opportunity, and use the recovery slider to model a realistic fraction of it rather than all of it.
What share of enquiries actually arrive out of hours?
It varies by industry more than any single figure suggests, and it is worth measuring rather than assuming. Take a month of enquiries from your inbox or CRM and count how many arrived outside the hours someone was available to answer. For consumer services the answer is frequently a third or more, because people deal with home and personal admin in the evening.
Does it store what I enter?
No. The calculation happens in your browser and none of the figures leave the page.
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