Missed calls and follow-up for garage door companies: text-back, answering, and what a missed spring call costs
A garage door tech is on a ladder when the phone rings. What a missed call costs a door shop, the text that holds the lead, who should answer, and how fast a form lead has to be called.
The call comes in at 7:15 a.m. A homeowner heard a bang in the garage last night, the door will not lift, and her car is inside. She searched, saw three companies, and called the first one. It rang five times and went to voicemail. She did not leave a message. She called the second one. That company got a $400 spring job and a review that mentions "answered right away."
You were the first one. You were on a ladder.
This is the biggest leak in most garage door companies and the cheapest one to fix. It is also the reason ads so often look like they do not work: the ad produced the call, and the call produced nothing.
What a missed call costs a door shop
Put your numbers in the missed-call calculator. The defaults are a shop doing 60 jobs a month at a $650 average ticket, missing 28% of inbound calls and closing 55% of the ones it answers. That shop is leaving roughly $6,000 a month on the table, and that is before counting the review the other company got.
Emergency repair makes it worse than in most trades. A plumber's drain customer might call back. A homeowner with a car stuck behind a door does not. She calls the next company within 90 seconds, and the first company that answers gets the job and never has to compete on price.
The text-back, word for word
Every missed call to your business line should trigger a text within 30 seconds:
"Hi, this is [name] at [company]. Sorry we missed you, we are on a job. Is your door stuck open, stuck closed, or something else? Reply here and I will call you back in a few minutes."
The question is the important part. It turns a missed call into a conversation. The homeowner types "stuck closed, car inside," you know it is a spring or cable, and you reply "We can be there between 10 and noon, $180 to $450 for a spring depending on the door, quoted before we start. Want me to book it?" The job is held before the next company picks up.
Follow with a second text 20 minutes later if there is no reply: "Still happy to help today. Reply with your address and we will get you on the schedule." Then stop. Two texts, no more.
Who answers: the options, with prices
The owner's cell. Free, and the owner is the best closer in the company. It also means the owner is on a ladder when it rings. Fine for one truck. Not fine for three.
A part-time office person. $18 to $25 an hour. Answers 8 to 5, books, dispatches, sends review texts. The best option once you have two or more trucks, because she also handles the follow-up the techs forget.
An answering service. $150 to $400 a month for a live operator who takes the name, number and problem and texts it to you. Worth it for evenings and weekends. Insist on a script that asks "stuck open or closed" and "is a car inside," because that is what lets you prioritize.
Call routing. The business line rings the office first, then two techs' cells in order, then the answering service. Set it up once in your phone system. It costs $20 to $50 a month and it ends the "I was on a ladder" problem for a one-person office.
Whatever you pick, pair it with the text-back. The text goes out whether the call was answered or not, and it catches the people who hang up during ring four.
Speed to lead for forms and Meta leads
Form leads are softer than calls and they decay faster. A web form or Meta lead called inside two minutes books at several times the rate of one called tomorrow morning. The person was sitting on the couch when she filled it out; by 9 a.m. the next day she has forgotten or booked elsewhere.
Wire every form to do three things the moment it is submitted: text the customer ("Thanks, [name]. Is tomorrow morning or afternoon better for the measure?"), text whoever is on duty, and log it somewhere the office can see. If the office cannot call in two minutes, the auto-text has to be good enough to hold the lead on its own.
Hours: say what is true
22.7% of garage door listings claim to be open 24 hours. 35.9% list no hours at all. Both are versions of the same mistake. The homeowner with the stuck door at 10 p.m. reads "Open 24 hours," calls, gets voicemail, and now trusts you less than if you had listed 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and she had waited.
List the hours a human answers. If you take calls until 9 p.m., list that. If you want after-hours leads, use the answering service or the text-back and say in the description "after-hours texts returned by 7 a.m."
Follow-up after the quote
Half the jobs a door company loses are quotes that never heard back. A new-door quote at $2,800 sits in the homeowner's inbox for three weeks while she thinks about it. Three touches, spaced out, bring a share of those back:
- Day 2: "Hi [name], just checking you got the quote for the 16 by 7 carriage door. Happy to answer anything."
- Day 7: "Install slots are open the week of the 21st if you want one. Financing is available if that helps."
- Day 21: "Last note from me. If the timing is not right now, no problem. We will be here when it is."
Calm, short, no pressure. An office person or an automated sequence can send all three.
Frequently asked
Is text-back worth it if I usually call back within an hour? An hour is too long for emergency repair. The text buys you the hour. It tells the homeowner someone real is coming back to her, and the question about open or closed gets her to commit a little, which makes her less likely to call the next company while she waits.
Does the text come from my business number? It should. Customers trust a text from the number they just called more than one from a random short code. Most business phone systems and text-back tools support it.
What about calls I miss at 2 a.m.? Let the text-back handle them: "We open at 7 and you are first on the list. Reply with your address and we will confirm a time." Most people with a stuck door at 2 a.m. are fine waiting until 7 if they know they are booked.
Missed-call text-back and lead follow-up is one of the services on the free 14-day trial: live the same day, every missed call texted inside 30 seconds, every form lead followed up. No card. Text or call (385) 534-3558.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, garage door companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor