A flooded basement at two in the morning is not a shopping decision. The homeowner is not comparing three quotes. They are calling down a list until somebody answers, and the person who answers gets the job.
For emergency work, answer rate matters more than reputation, price, or ranking. If your after-hours calls go to voicemail, you are not losing the ones who leave a message. You are losing the ones who hang up and dial the next number, and those never appear in any report you look at.
Do the arithmetic on your own numbers
You do not need a study. You need your own call log.
Count the calls that came in outside business hours last month.
Count how many of those left a voicemail.
Subtract. That difference is the number of people who needed you and moved on.
Multiply by your average emergency ticket. That is the monthly cost of the phone.
Most owners doing this for the first time are surprised twice: once by how many after-hours calls there are, and again by how few of them leave a message. People in an emergency do not wait for a beep.
An abandoned call leaves no lead, no form entry, and no CRM record. It is invisible in every dashboard you own. The only place it shows up is the raw call log, which is why almost nobody finds it.
Three ways out, in order of cost
An honest voicemail greeting. Free. If the message says a real person will call back within fifteen minutes, and that actually happens, some callers will wait. Most will not, but some is better than none.
A rotating on-call phone. Cheap and effective, and it works exactly as long as the person carrying it stays willing to carry it. That tends to be a shorter period than anyone plans for.
Something that answers every time. An answering service, or a system that picks up, captures the job, and reaches the technician who should take it. We built one of these because a client was losing overnight work and the alternatives were priced for companies ten times their size.
The uncomfortable part
Advertising harder does not fix this. It makes it more expensive, because you pay for the click and then miss the call. Fix the phone before you raise the budget.