How long will a customer wait on the phone? What the research says, and what it means for trades

Every tradesperson knows the feeling. You're under a sink or up a ladder, the phone goes, and by the time you can ring back the customer has already booked someone else. Is that just bad luck, or is it how people behave on the phone? I went looking for the research, and there's more of it than you'd think.

A note before the numbers: there's no published study on the patience of Irish trade customers specifically. What there is: decades of academic work on how long people wait on the phone, a large 2026 benchmark of US home services calls, and well-known studies on how fast enquiries go cold. Put together, they tell a consistent story.

Researchers have measured patience for decades

In operations research, the time a caller is willing to wait before hanging up has a name: patience time. Hanging up is called abandonment, and it's important enough that the standard way of planning call-centre staff was rebuilt around it. Garnett, Mandelbaum and Reiman's 2002 paper on designing call centres with impatient customers made the case that the older planning models, which assume nobody hangs up, give the wrong answers. The model they analysed, known as Erlang-A (the A is for abandonment), is now a standard tool.

Brown and colleagues then studied a full year of call-by-call records from a bank's call centre, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2005. One of their findings is that patience isn't a fixed number. It varies from caller to caller and can be measured and modelled, which is why big call centres plan around it.

Silence feels longer than it is

In his 1985 essay The Psychology of Waiting Lines, David Maister set out principles that are still quoted in service research. Two matter here: unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time, and uncertain waits feel longer than known, finite waits. A phone that rings out, or a voicemail greeting that promises nothing, is both: empty, and with no idea when anyone will get back.

Later work backs this up with real call data. Yu, Allon and Bassamboo studied a call centre's delay announcements (the "you are number three in the queue" messages) and found, in Management Science, that what callers are told changes how they behave while they wait. Information isn't decoration. It changes whether people hang on.

What happens to trade calls today

Invoca's Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report, published in July 2026, looked at calls to US home services businesses tracked on its platform. It's a vendor report and the sample size for home services isn't published, so treat the figures as a guide rather than a law of nature. Even so, they're striking.

• •Leaving out misdials and very short calls, the answer rate rises to 73% for calls longer than 30 seconds.
• •It varies hugely by trade: plumbing 74%, pest control 73%, HVAC 34% and construction 32%.
• •Of the calls a person answered, 38% were genuine leads, and 45% of those leads were booked on the call.
• •55% of businesses didn't ask the caller to book.

An older and smaller study points the same way. 411 Locals monitored calls to 85 small businesses over 30 days and found 37.8% were answered, 37.8% went to voicemail and 24.3% got no answer at all. That's six in ten calls not reaching a person.

In the US, missed calls now cost money directly too. Since 1 October 2026, Google charges Local Services Ads advertisers for some unanswered business-hours calls where the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. Twenty seconds is roughly four or five rings.

The ring-back window is shorter than you think

Calling back helps, but only if it's quick. The best-known study of response speed, by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington in Harvard Business Review (2011), looked at online enquiries rather than phone calls, but the behaviour is the same: a customer who wants a job done is shopping around. Firms that got back within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with the customer as those that waited even one hour longer. In their audit of 2,241 US companies, the average response time was 42 hours, and 23% never replied at all.

What this means for a trade business

• •Answer early or not at all. If you can't pick up, make sure something does within the first few rings, rather than letting it ring out.
• •Don't leave silence. A voicemail greeting that says when you'll ring back is better than a generic one, because a known wait feels shorter than an unknown one.
• •Ring back inside the hour. After that the customer has very likely moved on.
• •Ask for the booking. More than half of businesses in the Invoca data didn't, and those calls are the easiest wins.
• •Know your own numbers. Your phone's call log shows how many calls you missed last week. Most people are surprised.

This is the problem we built Ringvox to fix. When you can't get to the phone, it answers as your business in a natural Irish voice, tells the caller it's an AI assistant, takes their name, number, Eircode and the job, and sends it to your WhatsApp straight away, so you can ring back inside that hour. You can hear it answer a call or see how a job goes from the call to getting paid.

Sources

• •Garnett, O., Mandelbaum, A. and Reiman, M. (2002). Designing a call center with impatient customers. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 4(3), 208–227.
• •Brown, L., Gans, N., Mandelbaum, A., Sakov, A., Shen, H., Zeltyn, S. and Zhao, L. (2005). Statistical analysis of a telephone call center: a queueing-science perspective. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 100(469), 36–50.
• •Maister, D. (1985). The Psychology of Waiting Lines. In The Service Encounter, Lexington Books.
• •Yu, Q., Allon, G. and Bassamboo, A. How do delay announcements shape customer behavior? An empirical study. Management Science.
• •Invoca (July 2026). Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report, as reported by PPC Land, 6 October 2026.
• •411 Locals. Small business call study of 85 businesses over 30 days.
• •Oldroyd, J., McElheran, K. and Elkington, D. (2011). The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review.
• •Google Local Services Ads missed-call billing from 1 October 2026, as reported by PPC Land.