What a missed call really costs you

Your telephone provider will give you the record of unanswered incoming calls, free of charge, just for asking. Take a full month rather than a week: public holidays and closing days distort everything. You end up with a number, and that number is almost always higher than the team thought.

Some callers try again. Some would never have booked. The working assumption we use here is that around a third call back: it is an order of magnitude accepted in the trade, not a measurement we have made, and it drops the moment the competitor next door picks up first time. Count cautiously: two missed calls out of three are gone for good.

Count two to four covers per reservation, or your own figure if you know it: yours beats ours. Then take your margin per cover, not the amount on the bill: what you lose is the margin, not the turnover.

One single lost reservation a day, at thirty francs of margin, comes to around nine hundred francs a month. That is more than any contract on our list, and it shows up on no accounting line.

• The interrupted service. Every call picked up in the middle of the rush is someone on the floor leaving their tables for two minutes, and a welcome on the phone that gets rushed.
• Reservations written down wrong. A first name scribbled, a time misheard between two orders: the empty table on Saturday sometimes comes from a call that was actually answered.
• Reputation, one call at a time. A customer who never reaches anybody draws a simple conclusion. And passes it on.

Put someone on the phone. That is the classic answer, and the dearest. A casual hire costs around CHF 100 a service, and covers neither the evenings nor the closing day.

Send the calls to voicemail. It costs zero francs and it recovers very few reservations: ask yourself when you last left a message for a restaurant instead of calling the next one.

Have a phone assistant pick up. It answers without keeping anyone waiting, takes the reservation, confirms it by text message and passes on whatever is out of the ordinary. It works during the service, at night and on the closing day, for a fraction of the cost of a casual hire. The first contract starts at CHF 99 a month: one saved table already covers it.