Calculator: how much do your missed calls cost you each month?
Free tool for restaurant owners: calculate the revenue you lose every month on missed calls and unanswered messages. Results update in real time.
52% of booking requests arrive outside opening hours (TheFork, France Hospitality 2025). The rest arrive during service, at the exact moment nobody can pick up. Demand isn't what's missing. The capacity to take it is.
Every restaurateur knows that vaguely. Very few know how much it costs. Here's the method.
€23,400 lost per year for a 60-cover restaurant with 22% missed calls — calculate your own number below.
Why you need to measure before you act
Before subscribing to a tool, hiring extra staff or reorganising operations, run a quantified diagnosis. A quote is negotiable. A measured revenue gap isn't.
- A large share of calls goes unanswered during service hours: record yours over one week, your operator provides the log
- 52% of booking requests come in outside opening hours (TheFork, France Hospitality 2025)
- 30 sec is all it takes for a guest to book elsewhere if you don’t reply (Heep behavioural estimate)
The calculator
Three parameters, one multiplication, and you can redo it without me.
(requests received per week × missed request rate) × 4.33 × average spend per table = revenue lost per month.
Requests received come off your line's call history, plus the messages nobody handled. The miss rate reads off seven days: incoming against answered. Average spend you already know.
How to read your results
- Bookings lost per week. Your raw opportunity volume: every unit is a table that tried to come and went somewhere else.
- Revenue lost per month. Conservative: 1 missed request = 1 lost booking at the stated spend. Reality is worse once you factor in lifetime value.
- Recoverable with Heep. Estimate based on a 75% capture rate observed across the first months of deployment. Some restaurants reach 85% after fine-tuning.
Case study — 80-cover brasserie, Paris 11th
- Covers: 80/day, average spend €52 per table, estimated miss rate 25%.
- Calculation: 88 calls/week × 25% = 22 missed/week × 4.33 = 95/month × €52 = €4,960/month.
- Recoverable: €3,720/month with Heep — or €44,640/year.
Did your number surprise you? Verify it with a real deployment. Estimate your recoverable booking volume
The 3 levers to recover that revenue
Cover every missed call, 24/7
Every missed call triggers a WhatsApp or an SMS within 30 seconds. The guest gets a reply before they open Google, and a good share of those messages get an answer: that is where the recovery happens.
Unify your digital channels
Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, email, website forms: one queue, one history. Average gain: +30% of requests handled against siloed management per channel.
Sync with your booking system
Every confirmed booking writes directly into Zenchef, TheFork Manager or SevenRooms. Zero double entry, zero overbooking risk.
Before Heep, missed calls have no follow-up and the weekly revenue gap is measured nowhere. With Heep, every missed call triggers a follow-up, the reply goes out in under 30 seconds, and the dashboard puts a figure on the recovered revenue, estimated at your average spend.
The number to go and measure this week isn't in this calculation: it's your real miss rate. Seven days of history is enough. Multiply it by your average spend, then by twelve months, and compare the total with the cost of any solution, ours included.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the calculator for my restaurant?
It is calibrated on Heep restaurant averages (60% of clients in France, a mix of independents and groups). Treat the result as a conservative lower bound.
How do I measure my actual missed call rate?
Enable call history on your landline or mobile for 7 days. Count incoming vs answered calls. That ratio is your real rate.
Would all missed calls really have turned into bookings?
No, the opposite: the calculation is deliberately conservative. In practice only a share of recovered calls turns into a booking, which is why the result should be read as a ceiling, not as a promise.
How quickly does Heep deliver a positive ROI?
ROI turns positive in an average of 3 to 6 weeks for restaurants with a miss rate above 15%.
Does the calculator account for digital channels like Instagram and WhatsApp?
Yes: the “missed request rate” slider covers all inbound channels (calls + messages). If you don’t monitor Instagram DMs during service, slide that number up.
