If you've already run the phone coverage audit, you have something most restaurants don't: an honest count of how often your own phone goes unanswered, and roughly when. If you haven't, that guide covers why “probably some” isn't a real answer — start there if your own count doesn't exist yet, or use a short stopgap: count missed calls for two or three days at the windows you already suspect are busiest, and scale that partial count up to a rough weekly figure.
This page doesn't add a second industry statistic on top of the audit's own. It takes a count of missed calls — yours, or a rough guess — and turns it into a sense of what that gap might be worth, using numbers you already have and one assumption you choose for yourself, in the open, rather than one handed to you dressed up as a fact.
§ THE WORKSHEET
Three numbers go into this worksheet, and all three come from you — not from an industry table, and not from us. That's the only honest way to answer a question this specific to one restaurant, on one street, with one set of regulars.
- Average ticket. What a typical order is worth at your restaurant, before tax. Most point-of-sale systems already report this.
- Missed calls in a typical week. The count from your own audit — without one, this is a guess layered on a guess, and the range below is only as trustworthy as that guess.
- Your conversion assumption. The share of missed calls you believe would have become an order if answered. Nobody can hand you this number — the next section explains why — so the worksheet asks you to pick one on purpose, rather than borrowing an unsourced figure that merely sounds authoritative.
Multiply the three together and the result is a rough weekly range, not an invoice anyone owes you. Worked through with real numbers: an average ticket of $32, and a week that turned up sixteen missed calls, nine of them concentrated in a single Friday–Saturday dinner window.
| Assumption | Share you believe would have ordered | Orders in that range | Rough weekly value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 15% | about 2 | about $77 |
| Likely | 30% | about 5 | about $154 |
| High | 50% | 8 | $256 |
Same sixteen calls, same $32 ticket — only the one number nobody can verify moves between the three rows. That's a $77-to-$256 weekly range from identical starting inputs, which is exactly why this page shows three numbers instead of one confident-sounding total that hides the assumption inside it.
§ WHY EVERY NUMBER HERE IS YOURS, NOT OURS
This page will not tell you what a missed call is worth. Nobody honestly can — not us, not a vendor whose pitch depends on the number being large, not a trade association averaging across every kind of restaurant in the country.
What a specific missed call was worth depended entirely on who was calling, what they wanted, and whether they'd have spent $14 or $80 if they'd gotten through — none of that survives the call going unanswered. A dollar figure that claims to answer it anyway isn't measuring anything real; it's assuming an average across an unknowable population and presenting the assumption as a finding. Versions of a specific industry-wide dollar figure circulate in phone-answering marketing — worth real skepticism, since they don't agree with each other and none traces back to a publication anyone can actually go read.
§ WHAT THIS WORKSHEET CAN'T TELL YOU
Even with real inputs, this produces a range — it doesn't predict what happened to any specific caller, and it can't tell you whether a given missed call was a wrong number, a thirty-second question, or an order that would have run $60. It also can't tell you how many of those callers tried again somewhere else, or gave up on the idea entirely — which cuts against assuming the low end of your range is automatically the “safe” number either.
There's a dimension it doesn't try to capture at all: a caller who gets through today might order from you for years afterward, which means this worksheet's weekly figure — built entirely from one order's ticket value — is closer to a floor than a ceiling on what a coverage gap actually costs.
If the range above is wide enough to be worth closing, turn it into an actual plan-level comparison at the pricing estimator, or request access directly.