I Read 1,172 Google Reviews of HVAC and Home-Service Companies. One in Four Had a Customer Who Couldn't Reach Them.
I sell a 24/7 answering service for HVAC companies. That gives me an obvious interest in missed calls being a real problem.
Which is exactly why I measured it instead of asserting it — and why the method is published here along with the result.
How this was done
The sample: 59 home-service companies in San Antonio, Texas. HVAC, plumbing and related trades. All with a local phone number, all currently trading, no national franchises.
The data: up to 20 Google reviews per company, sorted lowest rating first. 1,172 reviews in total.
The question: not "was the technician late" and not "was it expensive." One thing only — did a customer say, in their own words, that they could not reach the business by phone?
The check: every review that matched was read by hand before it was counted.
What 1,172 reviews actually said
Of the 1,172 reviews, 1,068 had written text. Of those, 501 were one, two or three stars.
Twenty-five of those reviews said plainly that the customer called and nobody answered, or called and nobody called back.
| What was measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Companies in the sample | 59 |
| Google reviews collected | 1,172 |
| Reviews with written text | 1,068 |
| Reviews of 1–3 stars | 501 |
| Reviews saying the business could not be reached | 25 |
| Companies with at least one such review | 14 of 59 — about 1 in 4 |
| Companies where it was written in the last 18 months | 8 of 59 — about 1 in 7 |
That review is sitting on their Google Business Profile right now, where the next customer reads it before deciding who to call.
Why an unanswered call is a different kind of bad review
I expected the complaints to be about price or workmanship. Those exist, and there are plenty of them.
But the "I called and nobody answered" review is a different animal, and here is why:
It is the only complaint written by somebody who never became a customer.
Every other negative review comes from a person who paid you and was disappointed. That is a service problem, and better work fixes it.
The missed-call review comes from somebody who wanted to give you money and couldn't. They went somewhere else. Then they came back to write about it — which tells you how many more never bothered to write anything at all.
We wrote separately about why that invisibility is the expensive part: the real cost of a missed call isn't the call, it's not knowing.
What this study cannot tell you
I want to be straight about the limits, because they matter more than the headline.
I counted reviews. I did not count missed calls. No tool can tell you from the outside how many calls a business misses — that number lives in their phone system, not on the internet. Anyone who quotes you a dollar figure for a missed call invented it.
What this study says is narrow and solid: for about a quarter of the companies examined, at least one customer was annoyed enough about not reaching them to write it down in public.
The number who called, heard voicemail, and quietly dialled the next company is unknowable. It is also, obviously, far larger than the number who wrote a review.
One more honest detail: for 48 of the 59 companies, the collection reached the end of their negative reviews before hitting the 20-review limit. Nothing was extrapolated. That was all there was.
Small companies carry this risk, not big ones
A 300-review company absorbs one bad review. It disappears into the average.
A 40-review company does not. One review saying "I called three times and nobody ever picked up" sits near the top of the page and is read by everybody considering a call.
The businesses in this sample are mostly the small ones. That is who is exposed here.
The two patterns behind most of it: after hours, and Spanish
Two things showed up again and again in the sample.
Timing. Emergency trades get emergency calls — a failed AC in July, a burst pipe at midnight. Many of these listings say "Open 24 hours" on Google. Not all of them answer at 2am.
Language. San Antonio is a heavily bilingual market. A caller who reaches an English-only voicemail usually does not leave a message — they call the next company, and the lost job never appears in anybody's records. That is the case we made in why an HVAC company needs a bilingual answering service.
Neither pattern is solved by working harder. Both are solved by somebody — or something — picking up.
Three things you can check this week, for free
No purchase required, and none of these involve us:
- Read your own one-star reviews and count them by type. How many are about reaching you, versus about the work? That ratio tells you whether you have a service problem or an access problem. They have completely different fixes.
- Call your own number after hours. From a phone the office doesn't recognise, at 8pm on a Tuesday. Listen to what your customer hears. Many owners have never done this.
- Find out what happens when both lines are busy. In most small setups the second caller gets a busy signal, or a voicemail box nobody checks until morning. Ask your phone provider what actually happens — it is usually worse than you assume.
Run it yourself
This sample is 59 companies in one city. It is not the whole industry. If somebody runs the same test in another market and gets a different answer, I want to know about it.
But if you run a service business and the phone is where your money comes from, it costs you nothing to read your own reviews tonight and see which kind you have.
Hear it for yourself
Maya answers your questions on pricing, setup and getting started — and you hear the product itself while she does. In English or Spanish.
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Questions about this study
How many HVAC companies have a review saying nobody answered the phone?
In this sample of 59 home-service companies in San Antonio, 14 — roughly one in four — had at least one public Google review in which a customer said they called and nobody answered, or called and nobody called back. For 8 of the 59, that review was written within the last 18 months.
Does this measure how many calls a business misses?
No, and it should not be read that way. This study counted public reviews, not calls. No tool can tell you from the outside how many calls a business misses — that data lives in the company's phone system. What it measures is how often a customer was annoyed enough about not reaching a business to write about it in public.
How were the reviews collected?
59 home-service companies in San Antonio, Texas: local phone number, currently trading, no national franchises. Up to 20 reviews per company were collected from Google, sorted lowest rating first, for 1,172 reviews in total. Reviews of three stars or fewer were matched against a fixed list of phrases describing not being able to reach the business, and every match was read by hand before it was counted.
Why does a missed-call review matter more than other bad reviews?
Because it is the only complaint written by somebody who never became a customer. Every other negative review comes from a person who paid and was disappointed — a service problem. A missed-call review comes from a person who wanted to buy and could not reach you — an access problem. And the people who quietly called the next company instead never appear anywhere at all.