What it costs to have someone answer the phone, and when it pays for itself
A line-by-line cost breakdown of missed-call text-back, a live answering service and a part-time dispatcher for a tree company, with the payback math for each.
Your phone rang eleven times yesterday while you were sixty feet up a pin oak. You called four of them back at 6 p.m. Two had already booked someone else, one did not pick up, and one wanted a quote for a job you would have taken in a heartbeat, in a neighborhood where you have never worked.
There are three ways to fix that. They cost very different amounts, they fix different amounts of the problem, and the right one depends on how many crews you run. Here is what each one costs and the math on when it pays back.
Option 1: missed-call text-back software
What it is. A service that watches your business line and, when a call goes unanswered, texts the caller within seconds. The text says who you are and asks for what you need: an address and a photo of the tree.
What it costs. Generally $30 to $100 a month for a single line, depending on whether it comes bundled with a booking tool or stands alone. Setup is an afternoon. No contract on most of them.
What it fixes. It does not answer the phone. It catches the caller before they dial the next company. The caller who wants a job done this week will usually text back. The caller who was going down the list and hit voicemail often will not, but at least you know who called and what they wanted.
What it does not fix. Nobody quotes, nobody schedules, and the caller with a limb through the porch at 11 p.m. still gets a robot.
Option 2: a live answering service
What it is. A call center answering as your company, from a script you write. They take the address, the nature of the job, the urgency, and tell the caller when to expect a call back.
What it costs. Small plans generally run $150 to $400 a month for a block of minutes, with per-minute overage above that. A storm week can double the bill. Some services charge per call instead, usually a few dollars each.
What it fixes. A human answers every time, including nights and weekends if you pay for that tier. Callers get told something true: "The crew is out on a job, someone will call you back within the hour." That single sentence keeps a lot of jobs from walking.
What it does not fix. They cannot quote, and if you let them try, they will quote wrong. They cannot tell a hazard removal from brush cleanup. And they do not know your board, so they cannot book.
Option 3: a part-time dispatcher
What it is. A person, twenty hours a week, on your phone and your calendar. Could be a spouse, a retired parent, a part-timer working from home.
What it costs. At $18 to $25 an hour, twenty hours a week comes to roughly $1,500 to $2,200 a month before payroll costs.
What it fixes. Everything the other two do, plus scheduling, invoices, the estimate follow-up nobody does, and the review ask after every job. A dispatcher who has been with you six months can triage by photo and put the right job on the right day.
What it does not fix. Nights. Pair it with text-back or a night tier at the answering service.
The payback math
Use hypothetical numbers and then run your own in the calculator.
Say your company takes 100 calls a month and misses 30. Suppose half of those are gone for good, and you would normally close 40% of the calls you do reach. That is six jobs a month you never quoted. At an average ticket of $1,100 that is about $6,600 a month walking past your voicemail.
Against that:
- Text-back at $50 a month breaks even if it recovers one job every twenty months. It will recover more than that in the first week.
- An answering service at $300 a month breaks even on one recovered job a quarter. Realistically it recovers several a month.
- A dispatcher at $2,000 a month needs to recover about two jobs a month to cover herself, before you count the invoices that go out on time and the reviews she asks for.
The last one is the one owners resist, and it is the one with the highest return once you run two crews, because the owner stops being the bottleneck.
Which one for which company
One crew, owner on the saw. Text-back today. It is the cheapest thing on this page and it stops the bleeding this afternoon.
Two crews. Answering service plus text-back. The answering service covers daylight, the text-back covers the 2 a.m. storm call.
Three crews, or any company in a storm market. A dispatcher, with the answering service kept for nights and overflow.
One more thing on hours. 14.6% of the 87,219 tree companies in our data list themselves as open 24 hours, and 41.5% list no hours at all. If you claim 24 hours, something has to answer at 2 a.m., even if it is the text. If you list no hours, Google hides you from the "open now" filter that a homeowner with a tree on the car is using right now. The setup details for each option are in the missed calls guide, and the Google Ads guide explains why paying for clicks that ring an unanswered phone is the most expensive mistake in the trade.
Missed-call text-back and after-hours answering are both part of the free 14-day trial, any service, no card. Text or call (385) 526-4799.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, tree service companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor