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We Looked at 520 Missed Calls. More Than a Third Came Outside Business Hours.
We checked 520 missed calls across six service businesses over 60 days. More than a third arrived outside 8 to 5, and half the people who replied did it within a minute. Here's what the data shows.
Most advice about missed calls is guesswork. So we looked at ours. Over 60 days, six service businesses using Opulentus missed 520 calls. Every one of those callers got an automatic text back. Here's when those calls came in, measured in each business's own local time.
Key takeaways
- More than a third of missed calls arrived outside 8am to 5pm. That's about 3 calls every day landing when nobody's picking up.
- 6pm is busier than 9am. The day doesn't end when you stop answering.
- Nearly 1 in 5 people who got a text back wrote something back, and half of those replied within a minute.
- Even Sunday, the quietest day, ran about two thirds of a normal weekday.
More than a third of calls came outside business hours
Roughly six in ten calls came during the working day, which is what you'd expect. The rest did not. 193 calls arrived before 8am or after 5pm. Spread across 60 days that's about 3 a day landing when most owners have stopped answering, and those are the ones that hit voicemail and never come back.
- Before 8am: 26 calls, 5 percent
- 8am to 5pm: 327 calls, 63 percent
- After 5pm: 165 calls, 32 percent
6pm is busier than 9am
The busiest single hour was 1pm, with 48 calls. The afternoon stays heavy until about 4pm and then tapers rather than stopping: 6pm still took 35 calls, more than 9am managed at 25. People call when they get home from work. That's exactly when a lot of trades have already put the phone down.
Weekends are quieter, but not quiet
Thursday was the busiest day at 90 calls, with Monday and Tuesday close behind. Sunday was the quietest at 55. That's a real drop, but it isn't zero. Sunday still ran about two thirds of the average weekday.
Nearly one in five callers wrote back, and fast
Of the 520 people who got a text back, 95 replied. That's 18.3 percent. The striking part is the speed: the median reply came in after 1 minute. The average is 113 minutes, but that average is dragged up by a handful of people who answered the next morning, which is exactly why the median is the honest number here. Four in five didn't reply at all, and a text back doesn't turn every missed call into a job. But nearly one in five wrote something back who would otherwise have heard a voicemail beep and called the next company on the list.
What this doesn't tell you
We can see the call and the reply. We can't see the job. Nothing here says how many of those replies turned into booked work, or what that work was worth. A reply is a conversation, not revenue, and anyone selling you a number that says otherwise is guessing.
What we'd do with this
If more than a third of your missed calls land outside 8 to 5, your after-hours message matters as much as the one during the day. You can write a different one for each. That's less a product pitch than a scheduling fact: whatever you use, the evening isn't downtime for your phone.
How we measured this
520 missed calls across 6 service businesses over the 60 days ending 21 September 2026, counted as at the close of that day. Internal accounts, test accounts and our own company's account were all excluded: an earlier version of this post included our own business in the sample, which inflated the figures, and we have corrected it. Every timestamp was converted to that business's own timezone rather than a single clock. Six businesses is a small sample, most of them trades and detailing shops in the American Midwest, so treat this as directional rather than the last word. "Missed call" here means a call the system caught and texted back, not every call ever missed.
Want to see this pattern on your own phone? Start your free trial and every missed call gets a text back from your business. A card is required, and you won't be charged if you cancel before the 14-day trial ends.