What a missed call costs a restaurant, and how to count it
The calculator on the home page turns five numbers into two. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it on the back of a docket.
The five inputs
Calls per day, missed calls per day, the average length of a call, the average value of a guest who books, and the share of missed callers who would have booked if someone had answered. Four of them you can count. The fifth, conversion, is a judgement, and the calculator says so.
Missed calls a month
Missed calls per day, times 26 open days. We use 26 rather than 30 because most restaurants close at least one day a week. If you open seven days, the true figure is a little higher than the page shows.
Revenue on the line
Missed calls a month, times the average value of a guest. This is the top of the range: it assumes every missed caller would have booked, which is not true. That is why the next number exists.
Revenue recovered
Revenue on the line, times your conversion rate. If you believe half of the people who ring and get no answer would have booked, set it to 50 percent. If you think it is a quarter, set it to 25. The page defaults to 50 percent because that is our planning assumption, not a benchmark, and the fine print says as much.
Hours back
Answered calls a month, times the average call length, divided by 60. This is an upper bound. It assumes a receptionist takes every answered call, and in practice some calls will still reach your team: a supplier, a regular who asks for you by name, a complaint that needs a person.
Where the defaults come from
The starting values are published vendor figures, not Kade results. Calls per day sits at the midpoint of one vendor's small-bistro weekday range. Missed calls per day and average call length come from another vendor's report on restaurant phone traffic. Average guest value is a merchant-reported figure from the same report. The links are under the calculator.
What the numbers cannot tell you
They cannot tell you what a missed call costs in goodwill, or what an interrupted table costs in the review the guest writes later. They also cannot tell you what Kade would cost, which depends on your restaurant and is something we go through on a call. Treat the calculator as a way to size the problem, not as a promise about the fix.