As marketing experts in the home services industry , we are frequently asked by our remodeling partners: when should I have staff to answer my phones? At the heart of the question is the balance between the cost of staffing your phones after-hours and the benefit of answering after-hours calls. So, we’ve assembled a pool of data from across our home services partners to see when customers are calling in to book sales appointments.

The results may surprise you!

Customers love to call during business hours

We were expecting exactly the opposite, but customers overwhelmingly call to book sales leads during business hours. We thought the customers would be at work themselves or preoccupied with their errands, but that is why we collect this sort of data! Fully 91% of phone calls for our remodeling partners come in between 8AM and 6PM.

These results are important because your customers are looking for instant gratification – most callers won’t leave a voicemail if you miss their call. The voicemails you do receive are almost impossible to convert into a booked sales appointment. Those callers are going over to your competitors! With this data in hand, you have a good idea when you need to have a dedicated phone rep to guide those callers into setting up a meeting with your sales team.

Bonus insight – should you have a phone staffer on the weekends?

In answering this question, we also broke down the results by days of the week. Across all of our partners, only 8% of phone calls come in on Saturday or Sunday. If you’re thinking about hiring a phone staffer for the weekends, take a close look at the volume of calls you are getting – you may be able to push those leads to a chat service instead!

Hungry for more insights on running your business using data? Download our By-The-Numbers Guide for tips on running more and better sales appointments with a data-driven approach!