Missed-call text-back in Australia: what it is, what it costs, and what the law asks of you

Someone rings your business. You are up a ladder, under a sink, or driving with a trailer on. The phone rings out. Missed-call text-back is a system that notices that call was missed and sends the caller an SMS, from your business, within seconds.

That is the entire idea. There is no app for you to open and nothing for the customer to install. They get a text that says who you are, that you are on a job, and asks what they need. They text back. Now you have their name, their suburb and the job, in writing, and the lead is sitting in your pocket instead of ringing your competitor.

It is worth being precise about what it is not. It does not answer the phone. It does not talk to anyone. It does not quote. It buys you time and it captures a name, and that is all. That sounds modest until you count what a lost call is worth.

The reason this works has nothing to do with clever copywriting. It is speed.

The most-cited research on it is Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington's “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” in the Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Its own summary of what it found is blunt: “most companies are not responding nearly fast enough”, and the odds of ever having a real conversation with the person collapse as the delay grows.

Here is the part that is specific to trades. A person ringing an electrician at 7am with no hot water is not shopping. They are triaging. They will ring three numbers off Google in the next five minutes and go with whoever answers or replies first. Being second is the same as being nowhere.

A text that arrives in nine seconds gets read while they are still holding the phone. A callback at lunchtime arrives after they have already booked someone else.

Most of the numbers thrown around about missed calls are marketing. Do it with your own figures instead. The model is deliberately simple, and it is the same one behind our missed-call calculator:

Three inputs, and the third is the one people get wrong. Not every missed call is a job. Some are suppliers, some are wrong numbers, some are people price-shopping who were never going to book. A booking rate somewhere around a quarter to a third of missed calls is a sober starting point. If you know your real number, use that.

Worked through on genuinely conservative figures: ten missed calls a month, an average job worth $400, and 30 per cent of those callers who would have booked. That is 10 × 400 × 0.30 = $1,200 a month, or $14,400 a year, walking out the door.

Those inputs are the calculator's defaults, and they are defaults because they are modest. Ten missed calls a month is roughly one every second working day. Plenty of one-van operations miss that before smoko on a Monday.

Automated commercial SMS in Australia is governed by the Spam Act 2003, which the Australian Communications and Media Authority administers. It is worth the four minutes it takes to understand.

ACMA's own guidance sets out the obligations in three parts. Get consent first, then make sure every message you send does two things:

• Consent, before anything else. ACMA distinguishes express consent, where someone has actively agreed by filling in a form, ticking a box, or saying so on the phone or in person, from inferred consent, which can apply where someone has knowingly and directly given you their number and it is reasonable to believe they expect to hear from you. Under the Spam Act it is on you to prove you had consent, so keep a record of it.
• Identify yourself as the sender. The message has to say who it is from and carry your contact details.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe. A working opt-out, honoured promptly.

One trap worth naming, because it catches people: ACMA is explicit that you cannot send an electronic message asking for consent. That message is itself a marketing message.

There is no single right answer here. There are three routes, and which one suits you depends almost entirely on whether your time is worth more than the money you would save.

If you are assessing any of the three routes, these are the things that separate a system that earns its keep from one that quietly annoys people.

• It fires in seconds, not minutes. A text that arrives five minutes later has missed the window entirely. Ours goes at nine seconds.
• It sounds like you.“Thank you for contacting us, your enquiry is important” reads as a machine and gets ignored. “Sorry mate, on a job, what do you need?” gets a reply.
• It never fires on an answered call. Sounds obvious. Get the forwarding logic wrong and customers you just spoke to get a text asking what they need.
• It handles the repeat caller. Someone ringing three times in two minutes should get one text, not three.
• You can turn it off. On holiday, or on a job where you genuinely cannot take work, you need a switch.
• It does not pretend to be a person typing. Do not build a system that fakes a human conversation. Get caught once and you have bought yourself a reputation problem for the sake of nothing.

For most one-van and small-crew operations this is the right first move, and we will say so. Three situations where it is not, so you can rule yourself out in ten seconds rather than find out in month two.

• If most of your callers want to talk right now and will not text, catching them in writing does not help. That is a receptionist problem, not a text-back problem.
• If your call volume is genuinely high, you are not missing calls occasionally, you are structurally understaffed on the phone. A text-back on a hundred missed calls a month is a hundred conversations you now owe someone.
• If you do not answer the texts. This is the one that actually kills it. The system buys you a warm lead in writing. If nobody reads the replies, you have automated the act of ignoring people, and now you have done it in a medium that keeps receipts.

The alternative in the first two cases is an AI receptionist that actually answers the call. That is a bigger spend and a different product. We compare the two here, including where the extra money does and does not earn its keep.

The fastest way to understand this is to be on the receiving end of it. We keep a demo line running for exactly that. Ring it, let it ring out, hang up, and read the text that arrives. Nobody answers it, and nobody rings you back.

If the text lands before you have put the phone down, that is the whole product. The rest of what we do is the website it points at and the reviews it generates.