The short version
Missed call text back sends an automatic text from your business number the moment a call goes unanswered. It works because the person who just called you is still holding their phone and has not yet called the next company on the list, which they will do in about ninety seconds. Three things decide whether it works: speed, the text must land inside ten seconds; length, one line with one question beats a polite paragraph; and ownership, a real person in your shop must be watching the replies, because an automated conversation that nobody continues is worse than no text at all. It is the single cheapest fix available to a contracting business, it takes an afternoon to configure, and unlike ranking work it produces its first recovered job the same week.
The ninety second window
Somebody searches, finds you, taps your number, and it rings out. Watch what they do next. They go back to the results page that is still open behind them and tap the next number. That takes a few seconds, not a few hours.
That is the whole basis of this. A text that lands while the search results are still on their screen has a chance. A callback tomorrow morning is a call to a stranger who already solved their problem, and the polite ones will let you get halfway through the pitch before telling you.
So the timing target is not fast in a general sense. It is under ten seconds, ideally under five, measured from the call ending. Anything on a five minute delay is a different product with a much worse hit rate.
What the message should say
Nearly every default template we have seen is too long and too corporate. Something along the lines of thank you for contacting us, we are sorry we missed your call, one of our representatives will reach out shortly. That message asks for nothing, so it gets nothing.
What works is short, named, and ends in a question. Hi, it is Dan at Northside Plumbing, sorry we missed you. What is going on and what is the address? Three facts and one question, and the question is the same one your office would ask.
Two details matter more than they look. Using a person's name changes the reply rate, because people answer people. And asking for the address does more work than asking the problem, since anyone who types an address has decided to hire somebody and is now in a conversation rather than a queue.
Avoid the word appointment in the first message. It implies a process. At that moment the customer wants to know whether you can help, not whether you have a scheduling system.
Where these setups fall over
The failure is almost never technical. It is that the replies land somewhere nobody is looking.
We have walked into shops where the text was firing perfectly into a mobile number belonging to an employee who left in March. The system reported sends. Nobody read a single reply. A missed call is neutral; an automated text that opens a conversation and then goes silent is actively worse, because you asked a question and ignored the answer.
So before switching it on, decide who owns the inbox, on which device, during which hours, and what happens when that person is on a job. Write it on paper. This is the part that takes the afternoon, not the configuration.
The second failure is the message going out from a number the customer has never seen. If the text arrives from some ten digit number that does not match the one they dialled, it reads as spam and gets ignored. It has to come from your business line.
After hours is a different message
Most shops set one message and leave it. The after-hours version should say something different, because the customer's question is different. At two in the afternoon they want to know whether you can come today. At ten at night they want to know whether anyone will read this before morning.
Naming a real time works better than a promise. We will call you before eight tomorrow morning is a commitment somebody can hold you to, which is exactly why it gets a reply. We will get back to you shortly means nothing and everyone knows it.
If you genuinely do take emergency work at night, say what counts and give the number. No water on the floor, no answer until morning, is a completely reasonable position as long as you state it.
The rules, briefly, because people get this wrong
In Canada, replying to a person who has just phoned you is about as defensible as commercial messaging gets. They contacted you; the conversation is theirs. We still put the business name in the message and still honour STOP, because identification and unsubscribe are what the rules ask for and neither costs anything.
Where businesses get into trouble is what happens next. The list of people who once called you is not a marketing list. Using those numbers later for a spring promotion is a different activity under different rules, and it is the thing that produces complaints, carrier filtering and eventually a number that cannot deliver anything. Keep the two apart.
What it actually recovers
Be sceptical of any published percentage, including ours. The honest framing is that you are converting some share of a group previously worth exactly zero.
The number we see most often is that somewhere between a fifth and a third of texted missed callers reply, and a good chunk of those become work. On a shop missing thirty calls a month with a four thousand dollar average job, you do not need to be precise. One recovered job pays for years of the service. Two a month changes the conversation about whether you can afford a second van.
What it does not do is fix the underlying problem. If a fifth of your calls are ringing out, you have a coverage problem, and the text is a net under the hole rather than a repair. Run both: catch the misses today, fix the afternoon wall this quarter.
Doing it without us
This is genuinely not a complicated piece of technology and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. If you already pay for a platform that includes it, turn it on there this afternoon and keep your hundred dollars. If your phone system supports a webhook on a missed call and you have a messaging account, a competent person can wire it up in a morning.
What we sell is the copy written for a trade, the inbox set up so a shop can actually work it, the consent handling done properly, and a weekly number showing what came back. For a lot of owners that is worth ninety nine dollars and for some it is not, and both answers are fine.
What to do with the replies you get
The replies are shorter and blunter than a form submission and they arrive when somebody is standing in a hallway looking at a problem. Treat them like a phone call in writing rather than an email thread. Answer with one question at a time, and get to a time and an address inside three messages.
The mistake we see most is a shop answering a text the way it answers an email: a paragraph, three options, and a request to call the office during business hours. The customer texted because they did not want to call. Sending them back to the phone undoes the whole point.
Keep the thread going to the end too. A conversation that stops after the address is collected reads to the customer as being dropped twice by the same company. If you cannot take the job, say so in a line and say who might. People remember that, and it costs nothing.
One more habit worth building: when a texted lead turns into a booked job, write the job value in the thread before you close it. Thirty seconds of typing, and after two months you have a real figure for what the service returns instead of an argument about whether it feels worth it.
Watch for the calls it tells you about
The side effect nobody expects is that the weekly count of missed calls becomes visible for the first time. Owners regularly tell us the text back was useful and the report was worse news, because they had no idea the number was that high.
Use it. If the recap shows twelve misses a week and nine of them are between three and six in the afternoon, you have just been handed a staffing answer without paying a consultant for it. The text is a net. The schedule is the repair, and you now have the data to argue for it.
Check it on your own site
Decide who owns the replies before you switch anything on
A named person, a specific device, and a rule for when they are on a job. An automated question that nobody answers is worse than silence.
Write four lines of copy
Business hours, after hours, weekends, and holidays. Each one names a person, states the business, and asks a single question. Read them out loud before you approve them.
Send from the number people dialled
If it arrives from an unfamiliar number, it reads as spam. Check this by calling your own line from a mobile and letting it ring out.
Test it yourself at the worst hour
Call at 5:40pm on a Friday and at 10pm on a Saturday. Time how long the text takes and read it as a customer would. Most problems show up in this one test.
Count recovered jobs, not messages sent
The only number worth reporting is how much work came back. Messages sent is a measure of how many calls you missed, which is a different and less flattering statistic.