AIIMS Group analysed 207,000+ calls to Australian SMEs and found one in ten never gets answered, says co-founder Kynan Albassit.
Australian small businesses are missing roughly one in every ten customer calls before anyone picks up, according to new data from AIIMS Group, a Sydney based digital marketing agency.
The figures come from AIIMS Group’s inaugural Australian SME Lead Response Report, which analysed more than 207,000 inbound calls across 858 client businesses in nine industries. It’s worth noting upfront that this is AIIMS’s own client data, not an independent industry-wide survey, so the businesses studied are ones already working with a marketing agency rather than a random cross-section of Australian SMEs.
Even with that caveat, the scale is hard to ignore. Across the nine industries, the average call drop rate sits at 9.2%. In roofing, it’s 17.6%. In flooring, it’s 17.9%, meaning almost one in five calls to those businesses goes unanswered.
For context, AIIMS Group frames it like this: a business receiving 200 calls a month at a 9.2% drop rate is losing around 18 potential customers who called, got nothing, and likely rang a competitor instead.
The money angle is where it starts to bite. With cost per lead in paid search typically running between $80 and $150, AIIMS calculates that a 9.2% drop rate on 200 monthly calls works out to somewhere between $1,440 and $2,700 in wasted marketing spend every month, and that’s before factoring in what the lost customer would have been worth over time.
Kynan Albassit, AIIMS Group Director and Co-Founder, says the industry has been looking in the wrong place. “The industry conversation around SME marketing almost exclusively focuses on clicks, CPL, and ROAS,” he said. “Our data reveals that the real waste is happening after the call comes in. Better phone handling would improve ROI on existing marketing spend without increasing budgets by a single dollar.”
Albassit also linked the findings to why he’s seeing more SMEs adopt AI and automation tools for handling calls. “The question business owners are increasingly asking themselves is simple: would you rather lose the call entirely, or have a bot attempt to book it?” he said. “For high-drop-rate industries like roofing and flooring, where nearly one in five calls goes unanswered, an automated response system that captures the enquiry and attempts a booking is almost certainly better than silence. The businesses embracing that thinking today are the ones that will outperform competitors still measuring success at the click.”
Worth flagging here: AIIMS Group sells exactly this kind of phone automation and marketing service to SME clients, so the recommendation, while plausible, is also the agency’s own commercial pitch.
Beyond the headline drop rate, the report points to a few other patterns. Solar businesses answered the phone most consistently, with a 1.8% drop rate, followed by pest control at 5.1%. At the other end, roofing and flooring lagged well behind the rest of the pack.
The report also found that most callers aren’t repeat customers. Across all nine industries, 69.3% of inbound calls came from first-time callers. For locksmiths, that figure climbed to 82.2%, meaning the overwhelming majority of missed calls in that industry are new business walking away, not existing customers who’ll likely call back anyway.
“Every unanswered call is a customer who was ready to have a conversation,” Albassit said. “Business owners need to start measuring what happens after the phone rings, not just before it.”
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.